I came away from CXAUTO and Automotive News Congress with a lot of notes, a lot of conversations and probably more questions than I had when I arrived. That is usually a good sign. We spent a tremendous amount of time talking about customer experience, technology, data, AI, marketing and how quickly the automotive industry is changing. But there was one subject that really stayed with me because I believe it is going to become a much bigger conversation for dealers and vendors over the next couple of years. We have spent a lot of time talking about what AI can do for us. We talk about using AI to answer leads, create content, improve communication, personalize the customer experience and help dealership teams become more productive. What I think we need to start talking about now is something a little different: what does AI know about us?
When somebody goes to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI platform and asks a question about your dealership, your company, your product or even the category in which you compete, what does that system say? More importantly, where is it getting that information? That was the part of the discussion that really caught my attention. The more I looked into it after the event, the more I realized that AI visibility is not simply another version of SEO. There are really three parts to the equation: content, monitoring and infrastructure.
Most people understand the content part immediately. If you want an AI platform to understand that your dealership has a strong mobile service program, then you need information online that clearly explains your mobile service program. If you are a technology company and you want to be associated with declined service recovery, then your website needs to clearly explain what you do, who you serve and why it matters. The monitoring side is also relatively easy to understand. You can go into ChatGPT today and ask what it knows about your company. You can ask Perplexity who the leading companies are in your space. You can ask Gemini about your products, your leadership or your competition. That part is visible right in front of you.
The part that most people have never really had a reason to think about is what happens before the AI ever gets to your content. We tend to think of a website as one thing. We type in an address, the page opens and we assume that everybody and everything sees the same version. That is not necessarily true. Before an AI crawler or retrieval system ever receives your page, that request may pass through a CDN, firewall, bot protection system, cache, redirects and the web server itself. Any one of those systems can affect what actually gets delivered.
That means your marketing director could open a webpage and see the newest version of the content while an AI system receives an older cached version. Your robots file could tell an AI crawler that it is welcome while your firewall blocks the request. Your website could look perfect in Chrome while important information is being generated through JavaScript in a way that another crawler does not process as well. The question is no longer just whether the information exists on your website. The question becomes whether the AI system is actually receiving the version you think you published.
The easiest way I can explain it is to compare it to the customer journey, something we have talked about in automotive forever. An ad gets served, a customer searches, they visit the website, look at inventory, submit a lead, the dealership responds and hopefully the customer buys a car. We all understand that there are multiple places along that journey where something can go wrong. AI visibility is very similar. A consumer asks a question. The AI system interprets the question, identifies possible sources, retrieves information, evaluates what it finds, determines what is relevant and then creates an answer. By the time you see that answer, a lot has already happened behind the scenes.
That is why I keep coming back to the idea that content is still the foundation. None of this technical conversation matters if the content itself is weak. If you want AI systems to recognize you as an authority on fixed operations, customer retention, mobile service, recall marketing or any other subject, you need to publish information worth using. The mistake I think some companies are going to make is trying to write specifically for AI in the same way people once tried to write specifically for search engines. Years ago, websites were stuffed with keywords because everyone was trying to game Google. We do not need to make the same mistake all over again.
My view is pretty simple. Do not write for a robot. Write something useful enough that a person wants to read it and authoritative enough that a machine wants to reference it. If you have real experience, original data, customer results, industry research, case studies or unique expertise, put it out there. Give the AI systems something better to work with than the same generic content everybody else has.
I also think AI is going to change the way we think about content structure. Traditional SEO trained everyone to think about keywords. AI makes us think more naturally about questions. A dealership should not just have a page titled Mobile Service. It should answer the questions customers really have. What can you repair at my home? Can recall work be done through mobile service? How much does it cost? What area do you cover? How do I schedule an appointment? How is mobile service different from bringing the vehicle into the dealership? Those are the questions customers ask and they are also exactly the kinds of questions people ask AI systems.
The same thing applies to vendors. I see a lot of websites with very polished language that does not really tell you what the company does. You will see phrases like “transforming customer engagement through next-generation technology.” It sounds good, but it does not tell a customer or an AI system much of anything. A clearer statement would be something like, “We help automotive dealerships reconnect with customers who declined recommended service and bring them back to the service department.” That is not as fancy, but it tells you who the company serves, what problem it solves and what category it belongs in. I think clarity is going to become more valuable than cleverness.
There is also a much bigger opportunity around authority. AI systems need information they can trust. That gives companies with real data and real experience an advantage if they choose to use it. If a dealership group has meaningful data around mobile service utilization, publish it. If an automotive technology company has processed tens of thousands of declined service opportunities, publish a benchmark study. If an executive has spent 25 years working in fixed operations, let that person explain what they have learned. Instead of constantly asking how to rank, I think companies should start asking how to become the source.
Monitoring is going to become just as important. Every dealer and every automotive company can start doing this today. Ask ChatGPT about your company. Ask Gemini. Ask Perplexity. Ask questions that your customers would ask. Ask category questions. Ask who the leaders are. Ask how your company is described. Then look at the sources. Are they citing your website? Are they citing a competitor? Are they citing a trade publication or some third-party site that explains your business better than you do? That exercise alone can tell you a lot.
For years we have monitored Google rankings. I think we are going to start monitoring AI answers. There is a big difference. Google traditionally gave the consumer a list of websites to choose from. AI may give the consumer the answer directly. That means it becomes very important to understand not only whether your company is being mentioned, but also how it is being described and which sources are shaping that answer.
The problem is that monitoring only shows you the end result. If ChatGPT does not mention your company, there could be several reasons. Maybe your content is not strong enough. Maybe a competitor has more authority. Maybe your website is not technically accessible to the system. Those are completely different problems, which is why you cannot solve everything by simply publishing another blog post.
That is really the biggest takeaway I had from these conversations. AI visibility needs to be looked at as a complete system. Content determines whether you are worth citing. Infrastructure determines whether the information can be reliably retrieved. Monitoring tells you whether the strategy is actually working.
The phrase that keeps sticking with me is “what AI sees before you do.” By the time somebody inside your company opens ChatGPT and notices an incorrect answer, that answer is already the end of a much longer process. The more important questions happened before that. What information was available? Which version did the system receive? Did it understand who you are? Did it trust your page? Did somebody else explain your own company better than you did?
Those are becoming marketing questions, but they are also website-development questions, SEO questions, IT questions and management questions. That is why I am going to spend the next several articles breaking this subject down. There is simply too much here to cover properly in one piece. We are going to look at how to create content AI can understand and cite, what happens technically between your website and the systems trying to access it, how to monitor what AI is saying about your brand and finally how to put all of it together into a practical AI visibility strategy.
I do not think the question anymore is whether customers are going to use AI to research dealerships, vendors, products and services. They already are. The real question is much simpler: when AI answers them, will your company be part of the answer? And if it is not, do you know why?