How buyers find you now.

Google now shows an AI-written answer above the results on roughly half of all searches. Not the odd query, half. On top of that, a growing number of buyers skip Google altogether and ask ChatGPT or Gemini directly: which dealer, which model, whether it's worth buying approved used.

Worth saying plainly first: a lot of your buyers already know who you are. They've bought from you before, a friend pointed them your way, they drove past the forecourt last week. That buyer types your name straight into Google, or asks an AI tool about you by name, and your website is exactly where they land and exactly what has to do the work. That hasn't changed and isn't about to. Nothing here means your site matters less to that person.

What's different is the buyer who doesn't have anyone in mind yet. They're asking a general question, not naming a dealer, and an AI tool is doing the shortlisting on their behalf before your site ever gets a chance to make its own case.

What actually changed

Search used to be a list. You ranked, or you didn't, and the buyer clicked through and formed their own view. An AI answer collapses that into a paragraph. It picks a handful of sources, blends them into a summary, and most people read that and move on. Getting a click used to depend on your position on the page. Getting mentioned in that summary depends on something else: whether your site, and the wider web around it, gives the AI something clear and specific enough to work with.

That's a different game to the one most franchised dealer sites were built for. Stock feeds, service pages, locator pages, most of it was written and structured for a person scrolling, not a system extracting facts. Neither is wrong. They're just answering different questions.

Your website's job has split in two

For the buyer who already knows your name, your site is still the whole game, same as it's always been. For the buyer who doesn't yet, here's the part most pitches on this leave out. When you look at what AI tools actually cite when they answer a general question about a dealer, the dealer's own website is often a smaller piece of it than you'd expect. A lot of what shapes the answer comes from outside your site entirely: trade press, review platforms, forums, local coverage, the wider conversation happening about you that you don't control directly.

We build every Kee site to score like the pair above, high 90s and 100s across the board, because speed and structure are still the floor. It's what makes a site fast to load, easy to use on a phone at the roadside, and properly crawlable in the first place. What it doesn't fully cover any more is whether an AI tool actually cites you when it's compiling an answer for someone who hasn't named you yet, and that draws on a wider set of sources than your own domain.

For that undecided buyer specifically, here's roughly how the input stacks up:

01

Trade press & reviews

Usually the single biggest input. Independent coverage, buying guides, review sites, none of it published by the dealer.

02

Forums & local conversation

Real discussion AI tools increasingly draw on, not just published pages.

03

Your own website

Still a real input, still worth getting right, but usually the smallest of the three for a buyer who hasn't named you yet.

What this means day to day

Not that you're behind. Almost nobody in the motor trade has this properly sorted yet, which is exactly why it's worth a look now rather than in two years when everyone has. And not that the fix is complicated. For most dealer groups it's a short list of specific things, some on the site, some off it, in a particular order. What it does mean is that "how does our site score" and "how do AI tools actually describe us" are two different questions, and most people are still only asking the first one.