The 10-minute AI-answer self-check for used-car dealers
You can find out most of what a buyer’s AI assistant sees about your yard in ten minutes, for free, without us. Here is how. If you’d rather we do it, ask for a free Quick Look.
Why bother
In carsales’ 2026 consumer survey of more than 2,000 Australians, 35% of car buyers said they use or plan to use AI to help find their next car, and ChatGPT was the preferred tool for more than 70% of those users (carsales). In carsales’ Australia’s Car Buyer Report 2026, AI ranked sixth among car-research influences, behind review sites, manufacturer sites and others, and dealer websites were at 26% (Autotalk summary). It is an extra layer of research, not a replacement for your listings. It is still worth knowing what it says about you.
The checklist
- Ask it yourself. Open ChatGPT, Google (AI Mode or AI Overviews), Gemini or Perplexity and ask: “best used car dealer in [your suburb]”, “where to buy a used [popular model] in [your suburb]”, “[your dealership] reviews”, “what time does [your dealership] close on Saturday”, and “sell my car for cash in [your suburb]”. Write down whether you were named, and whether the phone, hours and address were right. Ask each twice: answers change from run to run.
- Make your details match everywhere. Compare phone, opening hours and street address on your website, Google Business Profile, carsales or Autotrader dealer page, and Facebook. Wrong or stale details are the most common reason an answer is wrong. Google lists keeping your Business Profile up to date among the basics (Google Search Central).
- Put your suburb in your page titles. Open your home, contact and used-cars pages and read the title in the browser tab. If it names a different suburb to the one your yard is in, fix it.
- Check you are crawlable. Visit yourwebsite.com.au/robots.txt. If you see “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *”, you are asking crawlers to stay away. Also look for “User-agent: msnbot” followed by “Disallow: /” — that rule can block Bing. Here is a 2-minute check. To appear in Google’s AI answers a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet, and there are no additional technical requirements (Google). Search “site:yourwebsite.com.au” in Google and see whether your pages appear.
- Write each stock listing specifically. Model, kilometres, service history, price, finance and warranty wording. Detailed listings are what get cited.
- Compare reviews. Look at your Google review count and the date of the latest one next to the yards that were named instead of you.
- Optional: structured data. Dealer address and hours can be marked up with schema.org (AutoDealer or LocalBusiness). Google says this is not required for its AI answers and there is no special AI markup; it is still good practice for consistency and rich results. You can test a page with Google’s Rich Results Test.
What you can skip
llms.txt. You will see tools and agencies sell this as the fix. Google’s guidance says you don’t need llms.txt or other special AI files to appear in its generative AI features (Google Search Central), and a May 2026 Ahrefs study of 137,000 sites found 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all (Ahrefs). We won’t sell it to you as a fix.
Want it done for you?
Email us your dealership name and website for a free one-page Quick Look, or read a labelled sample audit to see the fuller version. We have no client case studies yet and can’t guarantee any AI tool will name you.