Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Podcast Recap—a rundown of key lessons from top operators, founders, and execs shaping the future of auto retail.
Today’s guest is Zach Billings, Co-Founder of Wikimotive.
Billings breaks down why AI search is an evolution of SEO, not a replacement, and why consumer behavior is changing far slower than the hype suggests.
AI search is growing, but it's still a fraction of what drives leads for dealers.
When Wikimotive mapped LLM traffic against organic search traffic across 150 dealers, the gap was stark.
"Chat GPT out of the LLM was, by a mile, the winner…but compared to organic traditional search opportunity, it is half of 1% of the opportunity available to dealers."
Billings’ advice: Identify how much opportunity you actually have from AI today, align your investment accordingly, and don't let the noise pull dollars away from what's already converting.
Bottom-of-funnel car shoppers are still going to traditional search, not LLMs.
After running a live audience test at a recent conference, asking everyone to find an F-150 within 20 miles as fast as they could, Billings shared that every person who found one used traditional search.
"As people get lower in the funnel…those bottom-funnel searches…transition mostly away from being executed on the LLM and over to more traditional search methods."
In other words, consumer habits haven't caught up to the technology yet, and that gap is what dealers need to plan around.
GEO strategies being sold to dealers are misaligned with what actually works.
Most of the tactics being pitched (schema overhauls, robots.txt fixes, technical GEO checklists) have minimal impact on how LLMs surface local businesses, because AI tools can often read a vehicle detail page clearly even without schema data.
"There's all this buzz in the GEO space in our industry about…all these technical things that you need to do to show up…and the truth is actually that it's not that hard to parse these pages."
Instead, Billings points dealers back to reputation and traditional SEO—the two levers that actually influence what rises to the top.
Reviews are the single biggest lever for showing up in AI-driven local search.
When an LLM queries the web to answer something like "find me a Ford dealer near me," it looks for consensus, and reviews are the clearest signal of it.
"LLMs see that and they consider that what's called consensus, which is one of the biggest ways that when they're live querying the web, they decide what to put at the top."
That’s why he recommends treating Google reviews as roughly 70% of the effort, spreading the rest across platforms like DealerRater or Cars.com, and not overlooking grassroots channels like local Facebook groups and Reddit.
Presented by:
1. Openlane - The world’s best online dealer marketplace for used cars, bringing you exclusive inventory, simple transactions, and better outcomes. If you’ve never used OPENLANE before, or it’s been a while since you have, you’re eligible to earn up to $2,500 in buy or sale fee credits. Learn more @ openlane.com/cdg
2. Siro - Siro’s AI gives dealerships full visibility into every conversation. It records, transcribes, and analyzes in-person conversations. Proactively flagging compliance issues, missed revenue opportunities, and training gaps. Go to @ siro.ai/cdg to learn more
3. Wikimotive - Wikimotive delivers organic and paid search solutions to hundreds of dealerships from rural rooftops to multiple top-5 national dealers. Their focus is simple: get your store in front of people already searching for a car or service, and measure success by the leads and appointments that follow — not vanity metrics. Visit @ wikimotive.com/CDG/ to learn more.
Dealers who invest in SEO with a long time horizon are outpacing flat markets.
A mid-Michigan Ford dealer 30 miles from the nearest major market, sub-$10,000 all-in search budget sold 12% more vehicles in 2025 in a flat market with no budget increase.
"They didn't keep themselves tied only to short-term plays. They opened up their time horizon and they benefited from compounding interest, so to speak."
This, Billings said, came from splitting between nimble short-term paid campaigns and a steady long-term SEO investment that compounds, rather than treating the two as interchangeable.
There's real room to expand your geographic footprint through content.
That gap often has nothing to do with direct competitors, and everything to do with other franchise stores with stronger SEO are filling the space in between.
"We have before and after maps for some of our dealers…they've got their little position one bubble in their backyard at the beginning and then 18 months later they've got a giant position one bubble."
The fix is writing a real, human-generated landing page targeting that nearby market and building content that links back to it.
AI-generated content is being actively devalued by Google, which makes human writing is the edge.
Google's quality guidelines explicitly rate AI-generated content as lowest quality, and those guidelines have been tightened as LLMs have become more widespread.
"The search engines, Google, and ultimately the LLMs themselves are going to value human experience and expertise rising to the top."
Billings’ take: Write real content with real expertise, covering things like lease vs. buy, service, and local market context, because that's what both Google and LLMs are increasingly rewarding.
Measuring SEO on a 30-day cycle leads to cutting things that are actually working.
Google takes a minimum of three months to materially react to new content, and a full year to properly evaluate whether a solution is doing its job.
"We make decisions out of urgency…you have to buy into the notion that some things are long-term plays."
Instead, vet the fundamentals carefully upfront, then give it a 12-month window before drawing conclusions.
Inventory volume still determines who LLMs surface for product searches.
When a shopper prompts an LLM for specific inventory, a truck under a certain price, within a certain radius, the result tends to favor whoever has the most matching stock.
"If there's not something else to modify the result and to thrust something higher into the picture, whoever's got the most inventory that matches the search is most likely to be the one that gets brought to the top."
Third-party sites with large inventory aggregations are currently winning this game, which is worth factoring into how dealers think about their listings presence.
AI search advertising is heading toward something that looks a lot like Google's vehicle listing ads.
OpenAI's early moves, including a checkout partnership with Walmart, hint at where the platform is eventually headed, but consumer-facing execution has lagged behind the announcements.
"If OpenAI is able to launch an integration where you can do inventory feeds into OpenAI and when you're researching trucks, dealers, F-150s start showing up down a sidebar…that will become a relevant area of automotive marketing."
Billings’ POV: When that infrastructure matures, it'll be a genuine channel shift, but the dealers who benefit most will be the ones who already built strong inventory feeds, content, and organic foundations before it arrived.
