AI visibility statistics for car dealerships, 2026

How AI decides which dealer to recommend

• 84% vs 16%: how often AI engines named a local business when they had, or had not, opened one of its own pages while answering. 64,441 answers, 2026.
• Gemini: 92.2% named when it had read the business's page, 20.7% when it had not.
• Google AI Overviews: 89% named when it had read the business's page, 33.4% when it had not.
• Claude: 86.6% named when it had read the business's page, 11.9% when it had not.
• Perplexity: 81.3% named when it had read the business's page, 16.7% when it had not.
• ChatGPT: 79.4% named when it had read the business's page, 21.1% when it had not.
• 70% of AI answers named a competitor or nobody on a business's first measurement, before any work (18,613 answers).
• 120,000+ AI answers about local businesses collected and read by Cloute in 2026.

Can AI read dealership websites?

• 2,915 dealership websites tested in 58 US metros, October 2026.
• 29.5% refused or challenged a plain automated request (HTTP 403, 429 or a bot challenge).
• 0.3% block an AI search or live-fetch crawler in robots.txt; 2.2% block an AI training crawler.
• GPTBot is blocked by 1.1% of dealer robots.txt files, CCBot by 1.6%, PerplexityBot by 0.3%, OAI-SearchBot by 0.1%.
• 2.3% of reachable dealer homepages sent fewer than 500 characters of readable text without JavaScript; the median was about 6,433.
• 74.5% of dealer sites publish a robots.txt file.

What changes when a dealership works on it

• Karl Malone Ford: the share of AI answers naming the store went from 70% to 90% on identical questions eight weeks apart (June 30 to August 29), and answers naming it first went from 40 to 247.
• Karl Malone Ford on Perplexity: 62% to 98% of answers naming the store, identical questions.
• Karl Malone Ford on Gemini: 80% to 92% of answers naming the store, identical questions.
• Karl Malone Ford on ChatGPT: 63% to 78% of answers naming the store, identical questions.
• Karl Malone Automotive, six Utah dealerships: named 1.9× as often as their strongest rival, 54% of mentions the first recommendation, 52% of AI answers in their markets name a Karl Malone store.