How buyers find you now.
Michele McKee, Founder, Kee · July 2026
In short
- Search results and AI answers now write the buyer's shortlist, and they read your website to decide who makes it.
- They reward the same things a buyer does: speed, clarity, structure and trust.
- Get those right and the work pays off twice: found more often, and more convincing once a buyer arrives.
A car buyer's shortlist is written on a sofa, phone in hand, long before anyone rings you. That part you know. What's changed is who helps write it. Google's AI answers and tools like ChatGPT now sit inside that moment, reading dealer sites and deciding who to put forward. Yours is either making that cut or missing it. Here's how to tell.
How your site gets found now
Two things now point buyers your way. Google, where an AI-written answer sits above the results on around half of all searches. And the AI tools themselves, ChatGPT and Gemini, which a growing number of people ask directly. Both read your site to decide whether to put you in front of someone who hasn't found you yet. A person skims your page in seconds; these tools do much the same, in their own way.
What's stopping it
Usually the same handful of things, and they cost you with the buyer and the AI tools at once. A site that's slow to load. Content that's hard to read or thin on the answers people are looking for. A structure that's clear to the eye but a muddle to anything reading it programmatically. None of it is dramatic. It just quietly loses you enquiries you never see, and keeps you out of answers you'll never know you missed.
The signals worth checking
Four are worth knowing, and Google's own free Lighthouse tool scores each one out of 100. Speed, how quickly your page becomes usable. Accessibility, whether it's readable by everyone, including the tools now reading it. Best practices, the quiet trust signals of a site that's looked after. And the search basics that let anything find and describe you correctly. Here's the gap we tend to see, and where a Kee-optimised site lands:
Why it's worth doing
Because it pays off twice. The work that makes your site load fast, read clearly and earn trust is the same work that gets you found in search and named in AI answers. One improves the experience for the buyer already on your page. The other puts you in front of the ones who haven't found you yet. You're not choosing between them. It's one job, working two ways.
Check it for yourself
You can do this in ten minutes, and it costs nothing.
Run the report
Go to pagespeed.web.dev in any browser. Paste in the address of your used car search page, not just your homepage, and press Analyse. Half a minute later you'll get the same four dials shown above, each scored out of 100: red under 50, amber to 89, green from 90. It reads your page the way a buyer's phone does, on an ordinary connection.
Read what the numbers are telling you
A low Performance score usually means oversized imagery and too many tags and widgets loading before the page does. Accessibility below 90 tends to be missing image descriptions and unlabelled buttons, which also hide you from the tools now reading your site. A low SEO score is usually missing page descriptions, and links that say "click here" instead of where they go.
Ask the question a buyer would ask
Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask for the best place to buy your best-selling model near your town, without naming yourself. If you're not in the answer, the usual causes are pages that don't answer buyer questions in plain text, and a Google Business Profile that has fallen behind.
Most of the fixes sit in what you already control, even on a managed platform. The imagery you upload. The words on your pages. The tags running in the background, and your Google Business Profile. If you'd rather we ran the check, it's free and takes fifteen minutes. And if it turns up work you want done, we can help with the fixes too. Just say.
A few questions worth asking
Is this about AI or about our website?
Both, and that's the point. The work that makes your site better for a real buyer is the same work that makes it show up well in AI search. You're not choosing between the two, you're doing one thing that pays off twice.
Our scores are already decent. Are we done?
Good scores mean the foundation's right, which most dealer sites don't have, so that's worth something. There's usually still room to sharpen how clearly your site answers the questions buyers are asking, which is also what gets you named in AI answers.
Will this mean rebuilding our website?
Usually not. Most of what holds a dealer site back can be put right on the platform you already have: imagery, page structure, content, your Google Business Profile. A full rebuild is rarely the answer, and we would tell you if it were.
Prefer to talk it through first? Get in touch, or email hi@kee.co directly.