Pied Piper’s 2025 PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Auto Industry Study, which measured responsiveness to internet sales leads coming through dealership websites, found the overall auto industry average performance increased three points to 65, the highest average to date.
Looking at the past five years, the auto industry has maintained a steady upward trend in performance. For example, in the 2025 study, 28 brands achieved ILE scores of 60 or higher, compared to only eight meeting the same benchmark in 2021.
Subaru dealerships ranked the highest in the 2025 study, followed by Infiniti, Acura, Toyota and Lincoln. This is the first year Subaru achieved the top ranking in an ILE industry study. The Subaru brand performance improved by nine points for 2025, reaching an average ILE score of 77, the new highest auto brand ILE score to date. Besides Subaru, Acura, Hyundai, Lincoln and Fiat were the brands with the largest improvement compared to last year, each improving their ILE average score by nine or more points.
Behaviors That Improved
The ILE study found the average dealer achieved a net improvement in measured behaviors this year. Dealers responded to a customer through multiple paths (email, phone, text) 49 percent of the time on average in 2025, up from 44 percent of the time last year. Dealers this year were also more likely to answer a customer’s question by email or text: 69 percent of the time on average vs. 59 percent of the time last year.
Email responses in the 2025 study were also more likely to suggest next steps (73 percent vs. 67 percent) and give compelling reasons to buy from their particular dealership (27 percent vs 22 percent). Overall, dealers this year were more likely to answer customers’ questions and on average did so in less time.
The Importance of the 80/40 Rule
Each brand’s industry study ILE score represents an average that includes top-performing dealers as well as poor performers, each with a score ranging from 0-100. In the 2025 auto dealer study, 40 percent of all dealerships measured scored above 80 (providing a quick and thorough personal response), while 19 percent of dealerships scored below 40 (failing to personally respond to their website customers), according to Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s vice president of metrics and analytics.
The “over 80” and “under 40” segments shifted up six percent and down two percent, respectively, since last year. “The effort to improve is worth it,” said O’Hagan. “Historically, dealers who improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average sell 50 percent more units from the same quantity of internet leads.”
While many key dealer behaviors improved in the 2025 study, some measurements declined: The rate of texting a customer dropped from 70 percent in 2024 down to 64 percent this year, however, this drop was offset by a marginally higher rate of texts answering the customers question (38 percent this year vs 34 percent last year). The rate of dealers phoning a web customer experienced a small drop from 68 percent of the time on average in 2024 to 66 percent of the time this year.
Greatest Opportunity for Improvement
The behavior mathematically most likely to boost auto sales is embracing a multi-channel communication strategy instead of responding to customers using only email, only phone, or only text. Many customers miss emails, ignore calls, or get overwhelmed by texts.
Most auto dealers today reliably respond through at least one channel, but the next step is to master communication through multiple paths to improve their chances of reaching customers. Once contact is established, they should adopt the method chosen by the customer for future interactions. In this year’s study, 85 percent of dealers responded to a customer through at least one path, while only 49 percent used multiple paths.
“A consistent multi-prong response to every customer is critical,” said O’Hagan. “You never know in advance which communication method will be most effective at reaching a specific customer.”
Brand Dive
Subaru dealers this year were much more likely to reach out to website customers through multiple communication paths, doing so 71 percent of the time on average, compared to 49 percent of the time for the overall industry. Subaru dealers were also much less likely to score below 40—failing to personally respond to website customers – only 8 percent of the time on average, compared to 19 percent of the time for the industry overall.
Infiniti, which set the record with a score of 76 in 2024, was next at 73, followed by Acura (71), Toyota (70) and Lincoln and BMW, which tied for fifth at 68. Fiat made the greatest year-over-year improvement among all brands, shooting up 14 points, though its score of 62 was still below the average. Acura and Hyundai (tied for seventh overall at 67), gained 10 points.
Pied Piper has found that the key to driving improvement in website response is showing dealers what their website customers are really experiencing – which is often a surprise.
“We all agree that customers today visit dealer websites first, and how dealers respond to those customers drives today’s sales success,” said O’Hagan. “The trouble is that website customers can be invisible in day-to-day operations which makes them too easy to overlook.”
