Widewail CEO Cuyler Owens on AEO for dealerships: AI builds its verdict from the public record, and your reputation is the evidence.
Welcome to the REV. A weekly briefing on what the Auto industry can learn about customer experience from millions of Google reviews. Every Thursday, we Rank, Explore & Visualize automotive reputation & sentiment data.
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Cuyler Owens, Widewail CEO, jumping in for Jake this week. AEO is an important topic for automotive retail that I want to talk to you about today.
AEO, or optimizing for AI search, is coming up more and more in our conversations with dealers. There's plenty of advice out there about what dealers should be doing to their websites to prepare. Our view is that there's a simpler place to start: your reputation.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, or another AI tool where they should buy or service a car, that tool needs evidence to make a recommendation. Your website is part of that, and so is what your customers are saying about you across the web. We call this publicly available evidence the "record."
Experience > Record > Verdict
The record includes the dealer website, reviews, listing directories, forums, and third-party sites. Dealers have influence in two parts of the stack, the experience and the record.
Simply showing up is no longer good enough. AI will present businesses in order to warn customers against them. Success is visibility + recommendation.
Widewail helps dealers get control over reviews, review response, and listings, three key components of the record. Our automation handles most of the work, and the outcomes are tested, proven, and reliable. The typical Widewail dealer client gets 44 reviews each month with an average rating of 4.7. Why? We help you share the experiences of the "silent but satisfied" majority of your customers. This cross section of customers exists for every dealership.
Your Reviews Are Becoming Part of Your AI Search Strategy
Our take on why reputation and AI search are starting to overlap, and where dealers should focus.
Is Your Dealership Ready for AI Search? A 15-Minute Reputation Audit
A simple exercise you can run today to see how your dealership shows up in AEO results, and where you can focus to improve things fast.
The best part: you don't need to be a Widewail customer to take advantage of any of the frameworks we share here. AEO is moving quickly, and plenty of claims are being made about what dealers "need" to do. We wanted to give you a practical place to start, whether you decide to work with us or not.
Hope it's helpful.
Cuyler
We do live virtual events every few weeks. Watch previous events on demand at widewail.com/live.
I’m the Director of Marketing here at Widewail, as well as a husband and new dad outside the office. I'm in Vermont by way of Boston, where I grew the CarGurus YouTube channel from 0 to 100k subscribers. I love the outdoors and hate to be hot, so I’m doing just fine in the arctic Vermont we call home. Fun fact: I met my wife on the shuttle bus at Baltimore airport. Thanks for reading Widewail’s content!
Every Thursday we Rank, Explore, and Visualize automotive reputation and sentiment data.
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