Hey. I get this question a lot. So what are we doing with AI right now when it comes to paid advertising? And there’s a lot of conversation about when is AI gonna allow ads. There’s a lot of rumors. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. There’s a lot of things that we can do right now. There’s a lot of things that are in beta right now. There’s a lot of things that we can’t do. So I wanted to spend just a few minutes and go over some of the things that we know right now, some of the things that we can be doing to prepare for advertising in AI, and things that we can do to advertise in AI that’s available for today, as well as things that you can do to make sure that you’re showing up in AI results organically, which really is the game changer. So to do that, let me just go ahead and share my screen a little bit, make sure I got some of my notes here ready. So really what we’re doing is we’re moving from what has traditionally been a click economy into a recommendation economy. So in the past, whether it’s organic or it has been paid, the goal has been to really do everything that we possibly can to capture that click. From an organic standpoint, we were adding keywords to a page to make sure that it was relevant. We were taking that page to make sure it loaded really fast, to make sure that it was optimized for search engines to rank. And if we did our job as SEO providers or website providers, when a customer did a search for a specific prompt in a search engine, then our ranking, our result would show up in one of the links and if we’re paying for it, it might show up at the top or on the bottom or whatever. But that really was the goal is to capture that click. So what we’re moving into is now into this recommendation economy. And the goal of websites, and when I’m talking about websites, I’m specifically talking about dealership websites, the goal for dealership websites is to make sure that we have the information on the website so that AI can cite your dealership website and that content when it makes recommendations. A lot of the lot of the things that have changed recently is not only where customers are searching online, coming away from Google and maybe going into ChatGPT or getting the AI mode in Google or the other platforms that are available. But the reality is not only is the platform changed, but what also has changed is the way that customers are asking questions. They are now asking specific long tail type of questions. Where is the best place to lease a Honda Civic in Tampa? And it’s the interpretation of that AI system to determine what is the best. Does the best mean the lowest price? Does the best mean that they have the highest rating on Google or other platforms? Are there any Better Business Bureau or BBB complaints for that particular dealership? All of these things are gonna go into the way that AI is going to recommend one dealership over another. So moving away from this idea of a click economy into a recommendation economy is gonna go much further than making sure that you have words on a page that you can rank highly. All of these other things are gonna be in consideration. So with that said, AI is now becoming the personal shopper so that marketing becomes about being the most trusted input. What do I mean by this? I mean that when you are providing information to a customer from your dealership website, it needs to be on the site, it needs to be structured in a way that humans can read it, and the way that machines can read that information. So it’s not just about what you have on your site, but how it is added to your dealership website. And we’re going talk about that a little bit today. But really that shift that’s happening right now is search engines, and if we go back to the early days of Excite or AskJeeves or any of the other early search engines, the way that customers interacted with these search engines really hasn’t changed. AI is changing the behavior where they’re asking those questions, and your website and all of your other platforms, whether it’s Google Business Profile with Google reviews, your Better Business Profile with your overall BBB rating, your Cars dot com reviews, your dealer rated reviews, all of those things AI is referencing to make sure that you are gonna be that most trusted input. So what else can we talk about today? Thinking about AI and the way that customers are interacting with these AI platforms, again, doing a comparison between search engines and AI platforms, search engines, you would have created some sort of prompt. You would have gotten a whole bunch of listings. Those listings would be ranked by what is probably most important, or what the search engine thought was gonna be the most important. AI is keeping the customer in one place. It is the new interface. They are automatically filtering the content. So they’re not just providing a whole bunch of different links that a customer can go through and then pick which one is gonna be what they feel is the most relevant. AI is gonna do all of that filtering for the customer, and then the customer is going to continue to follow-up with additional questions based on what those results were. For example, I just did a search a little while ago in preparing for this video, and I said, where is the best place to lease a new Honda Civic in Denver? And it gave me a bunch of different responses. And then it’s it didn’t rank what was the lowest price. So I had to follow-up with what’s where’s the lowest price I can get a lease for a new Honda Civic. It didn’t automatically rank in filter based on the city. So it gave me the lowest prices it could find all over the United States. So I had to follow-up with an additional question, where’s the lowest priced Honda Civic lease in Denver? And then finally, it gave me some pricing information. So you have to think about how AI is going to be how people are going be interacting with AI, how they’re going to ask questions, how they’re going to ask follow-up questions, and how AI is going to respond in the way that it filters that information. So AI truly is gonna become the recommender versus just the place to show the information. So it’s gonna help the customer kind of filter down, find the dealership that they feel that is gonna be the most important. They’re gonna include those links as well, and then they’re gonna either follow that link, go to your dealership website, or they are gonna try to contact you or just walk into the dealership. I think that’s what’s happening more and more, and we’re seeing that as a trend in automotive is that there are fewer organic clicks, there’s fewer paid search clicks, and there’s just fewer there’s less traffic coming to a dealership website because the way that AI is changing the way that customers behave when they are searching. So what really is changing between Google versus ChatGPT? So one of the things that we’ve noticed in our research is what Google is trying to do is replace the car dealership website. Now we’re not saying that this is happening now or it’s gonna happen anytime soon, but what they want customers to do is to stay right there in Google. So they do a search, they get an AI mode result, they have links that they can follow through, but Google will also be able to serve up recommendations, whether it’s being done right now in automotive or it’s just being done industries, they can serve up shopping responses and shopping activities that can be done right inside of Google. So the customer no longer has to go to the company website. And like I said, a lot of this stuff isn’t automotive specific right now. We’re talking about what they’re doing right now with some beta testing, what’s gonna be happening next. But if Google can control that entire purchase experience, you can better believe that they’re going to try to do that. So what we need to do as dealers is to make sure that we are becoming the most relevant and that our dealership is gonna have the information on the website that is gonna be that trusted source. So again, not only what you have, but how you have that information added to your dealership website so you can become that go to trusted source. And again, making sure your reviews are strong, that you’re doing the right things to the customer to get those good quality reviews, you’re looking at your Better Business Bureau, you’re looking at the other review platforms, all of those things are gonna be important when you’re optimizing for AI. It’s not just gonna be the guy, the nerdy guy in glasses that is doing the SEO on the website, it’s actually how you’re operating your business is gonna change the way that you become that trusted dealership in your marketplace. So again, like I said, this doesn’t mean that websites are gonna disappear tomorrow, but it does mean that the top of the funnel is now changing. We think about how it was five years ago or ten years ago. Customers needed information. They would go to a search engine. They would type in some sort of prompt. They would get a response. The dealership website would either rank organically or they would pay for ranking, and the customer would then click. That whole model is changing. The top of the funnel now is AI with customers asking full questions, and then the AI system is helping the customer filter through the response until it gets exactly what the customer is looking for, and then potentially at that point we’re gonna be able to get that click. And then when we do get that click, we need to make sure that the dealership website is set up in a way that is gonna allow the customer to frictionlessly go through your dealership website to get the information that they’re looking for and tie that experience into what’s gonna happen when they physically visit your dealership website. So AI interfaces today, they are changing the way that customers interact. And from a marketing standpoint, they are changing the top of the funnel from a search engine with words on a page, ranking, and lists, to actual conversations, into filtering, into recommendations, into helping the customer make the decision of where they wanna do business. So it really comes down to if AI can’t confidently parse through the offer that’s on your dealership website with the pricing, the availability, the value propositions, you’re not gonna be the one that gets recommended. Just like my example a little while ago, where’s the best place to get a lease on a new Honda Civic in Denver? What does best mean? Does best mean the best deal, the lowest price? Does it mean the lowest down payment, the lowest monthly payment? Does it mean the dealership has the highest rating? All of those things AI is going to guess on what the context is for the customer. And then it’s up to the customer to have that conversation to filter down, and we wanna make sure that your dealership is gonna be in that consideration step. So it’s like regardless of your investments in marketing, what is gonna be most important is gonna be the content that we have on your dealership website. Not only what content, but how it’s added to your dealership website. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about today. So specifically, we wanna make sure that your offer pages are clear, that they’re concise, that they’re providing full information. It’s one of the things that I see a lot when I do tests and I look at other dealership websites. And I do this quite often, where I’ll just randomly have ChatGPT give me a city and an OEM. I’ll take that result, I’ll do a quick Google search, and I’ll find that first dealership website that matches that query, and then I’m gonna look at that dealership website and see how that dealership is presenting their offers. This is typically what I see. I see most dealers only having two or three, maybe four core offers. So maybe if it’s a Toyota store, it’s Camry, Corolla, Tacoma, Tundra, maybe a RAV4, only focused on offers for those core vehicles, having that on maybe a slider on the homepage, and then they have that same image they have on the slider for the homepage on a search results page if you have a dealership that even has a offers search results page, and they’re all listed there. But just the images with all of that great content embedded in the image with ChatGPT and other systems are not gonna read, they’re not gonna use that information, they’re not going to use that to make the recommendation. All of that content, whether it is the offer, the make, the model, the trim, the down payment, the monthly payment, what you have to do to qualify, how many vehicles you have available. It’s that information that needs to be added to dedicated landing pages for each one of those offers, and it is clearly communicated not only with the information embedded on the page, but also embedded in way with schema on the backside of the dealership website that allows AI machines to be able to read that information. The more clear that you can make it, the more they are gonna want to use your dealership in a response. VDPs that don’t consistently expose options, packages, and pricing context. So in automotive, we know that we’ve had this idea, this methodology, this way of thinking that we want to hold back information. We want to hold information tight. We don’t wanna be fully transparent. We don’t wanna be transparent with discounts. We don’t wanna be transparent with what the down payment means. We don’t wanna be transparent with what the full leasing picture looks like. And it is that lack of transparency that maybe has helped us in the past creating curiosity for customers to be able to reach out to you to get answers, but now customers are not going to you looking for answers, they’re going to AI looking for answers. And if you’re not transparent on your dealership website, you’re not transparent with AI to be able to make those recommendations. So we have to rethink the way that we have protected data in the past and to be more open, to be more transparent. These are things that have changed really fast over the last twelve months. We just think about what’s gonna happen in the next twelve months, the next three years, five years, seven years. We need to start planting the seeds now and understanding how AI is changing customer behavior and the way that we can start to build our content on our websites in a way that is gonna align with the way AI wants to research, understand, read, index information that’s on your dealership website. Same thing, service pages. Service pages with just vague information about we are a service department. We do brakes, tires, and other things. Schedule your service appointment now. Service has typically been kind of a on the back burner for many dealership websites, with most of the content being very variable operations forward. And all of that great information about service departments, what you do, how you do it, hasn’t made its way to so many different dealership websites. So what needs to change now today is making sure that you have the right content written in a way that machines can understand what you do for service. We recently kicked off an agenda here through Entice three sixty, adding to all of our dealership websites a whole series of pages that are dedicated to individual items that car dealerships are doing. Set up in a way that is gonna provide great content for humans that are gonna read that page, but more importantly, all of that information set up in a way that machines can index that, they can cite it, and then they can use that in the recommendation. So now when a customer says, where’s the best place to get a brake job on a Honda Civic in Tampa, our dealership websites are gonna have that information. Where, you know, what does it mean for the check engine light? What do I need to look for to help diagnose that? Those types of things in many different pages optimized for AI discovery through dedicated landing pages with proper schema and frequently asked question schema added to the backside of the dealership’s website pages to be able to expose that information to AI so they can use it in their AI discovery answers. So let’s talk a little bit about paid ads when it comes to AI and specifically Google versus ChatGPT. So right now, this is kind of a hot topic, and I think I might even started out this video with that idea of what is available right now from a click, paid click standpoint on ChatGPT and Google. Let’s talk about Google real quick. Google already has ads that appear in their AI Answers. And what they’re looking for is good quality ads that is gonna provide value based on what the customer is searching in context with its conversation. So the way that paid advertisement has worked before with Google Ads, you are bidding on keywords. They’re gonna look at the page content, the ad content. They’re gonna give some sort of optimization or quality score. So based on what your overall bid, your overall quality score, you’re gonna rank on that keyword once a customer actually does a search. So that’s kind of search engine marketing and paying for the click and bidding on the keyword. AI discovery is changing the way that works. When a customer in context is having a conversation with AI and Google determines that an ad would be appropriate to be able to surface right in their AI, they’re doing that right now. You can’t bid on AI placement. You can’t set up your account to either use AI placements or not use AI placements. What you can do to make sure that you are getting good placement is number one, have good quality content structured on your dealership website that aligns with the overall ad structure that you have built, whether it’s a performance max, p max campaigns, whether it’s a shopping ad, whether it is a responsive text ad. It’s gonna look at the overall quality score of the ad, they’re gonna look at the overall optimization score of the ad account, and they’re gonna look at the content that is on the landing page from the landing page URL. And if all of those things align, and you have the good high optimization scores and the quality scores, and that information is gonna add value to the context of the conversation, then Google is going to present your ad. So it is changing the way that search engine marketers like us have to optimize our accounts, but it really plays into exactly what we’ve been doing forever, and that is to understand how Google Ads work, optimize the way that Google Ads want us to optimize, use the tools that are inherently built into Google Ads, and make sure that it is a nice, clean, structured ads account, campaign, content on the dealership website, all of those things, it comes down to quality and management. And that’s been a strategy that we’ve been implementing for many, many years. So the real lever isn’t how do I buy that AI spot, it now comes down to are our campaigns healthy, are they relevant, Are they structured well enough so that Google’s ecosystem can confidently include us or our dealership clients with an ad when the AI suggests that we should be surfacing some sort of advertisement. So all of those things go into that. So what’s coming next? So ChatGPT, we use ChatGPT for a ton of things. I personally use ChatGPT for a lot of information, and the way that I’m communicating with them with ChatGPT is a part of the way that I operate my business. It’s the same way that customers are operating when it comes for shopping for a new vehicle. And there is a lot of conversation, there’s a lot of talk around advertising on ChatGPT. Right now, there’s only some beta testing that is going on, there’s no platform, you can log in, you can’t create a ChatGPT advertisement account. You can’t build out ads. But these are things that ChatGPT is doing. And they’re thinking about advertising in a different way than Google is. Google, when you go to Google dot com, you do a search, they’re gonna give you an AI result, and then you can have a conversation with AI. Because Google is already a search engine, because they already have a mature advertising ecosystem, they’re gonna merge the two. And the goal is going to be to try to keep that customer within that Google ecosystem. So they can research, they can have conversations, they can review the answers, they can filter. When I’m saying they, I mean customers. Customers can search. They can ask questions. They can get context. They can help filter. They can get to the point where they’re gonna be recommended. And then Google can also serve up keeping the customer right there to buy whatever product so they can keep the customer in that Google ecosystem. From the research that I’ve seen, ChatGPT is a little bit different. What they’re kind of thinking themselves as is we have this interface where customers can have conversations and do research. They’ll then be able to, the same way, serve up an advertisement that will click out and go through to a website, or go through another platform where they can do the purchase transaction. That’s not the type of ecosystem that ChatGPT has, but it is the type of ecosystem that Google has. So Google’s approach is going to be different than ChatGPT’s approach. For marketers and website providers, it’s up to us to really understand how can we leverage and use ChatGPT as a paid marketing channel. How can we use ChatGPT as a way to get more market share? How can we use ChatGPT to increase our impression share? How can we make sure that we’re getting as much organic and paid traffic from that ChatGPT channel? On the Google platform, it is going to continue to be search engine marketing, buying those keywords, understanding that the content is gonna drive what the AI systems are gonna serve up, and where we’re gonna want to help dealers decide where they’re gonna allocate their marketing dollars. Whether that will be ChatGPT, whether that continues to be AI inside of Google, I’m sure it’s gonna be a combination of both. So that’s really where we’re where we’re at today in early twenty twenty six from an AI standpoint for ChatGPT for Google from an organic standpoint, and from an ad standpoint. So here are some things that I will lead you with. What we wanna do as dealers is we wanna make sure that we make our offers un ambiguous. And what that means is we wanna make our offers unambiguous. We wanna be clear. We wanna be concise. We wanna be fully transparent. We wanna provide the year, the make, the model, the down payment, the monthly payment, what a customer would have to do to qualify, how many vehicles that you have available in stock that’s gonna qualify for these offers, What a customer has to do to get that vehicle. How long would it take for a customer to buy that vehicle? What’s the first step a customer has to take to qualify for that offer? All of those things should be on dedicated landing pages with frequently asked questions, answering all of that information. We wanna make sure that we are strengthening all of the key pages throughout our dealership website, whether that is gonna be a search results page for inventory or a vehicle display page for dedicated detail pages for inventory. National offers, monthly dealership offers, all of that information, making sure that we have all the content on the page, but also in a way that humans can interact with it, but also machines as well. Another biggie is making sure that we have structured content on every page, including frequently asked questions. I believe that frequently asked questions should be on every single page on the dealership website. It should be on the home page, it should be on search results pages, it should be on vehicle detail pages, it should be on offer pages, it should be on service pages, it should be on service special pages. Frequently asked questions, I think, are gonna be the juice that is going to power AI discovery optimization. Another thing that we need to do as marketers and as dealers is to change the approach of how we are using tools like Google Analytics to measure success. It has been in the past, how many clicks, how many users, what events are taking place. As we shift into a new AI powered world, the things that we have used as the key performance indicators are going to change. We’re gonna wanna make sure that we’re looking at assisted conversions. We’re gonna look at more than just how long the session was, how engaged the customer was during that session. Those things are going to change, and the dealers that are gonna win are the dealers that’s paying attention to that right now, and they’re keeping their eyes open to understand that customer behavior is changing, and our websites and our business model must also change. I’m gonna go ahead and leave it there. I appreciate you spending whatever little bit of time that you do with me here on these videos. Of course, you’re going to find this video and many others at entice dot com.