Stop Chasing the Click: How Modern Car Buyers Actually Make Decisions

Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping the automotive search landscape, often replacing predictable rankings with volatile, citation-driven visibility. This data-backed session shares 1,600 automotive search queries across Pensacola, Kansas City, and Dallas to uncover when AI Overviews appear, which dealerships get cited, and why some persist while others disappear.

This session breaks down how AI Overviews behave across transactional, commercial, and informational searches, as well as what that means for dealership visibility at every stage of the funnel. You’ll see how crowded today’s SERPs have become, what role traditional rankings still play in citations, and whether the same dealerships appearing in Google are also being recommended in platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Most importantly, the findings will be translated into practical content tips, showing how top-performing dealership pages are structured, written, and enriched to consistently earn citations. You’ll walk away with clear, real-world tactics to move beyond rankings and start optimizing for recommendation.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover what high-performing dealership pages do differently, from content structure, context, and formatting to media usage and topical depth, as well as how to apply those insights to your own site
• Learn how often AI Overviews trigger for transactional, commercial, and informational automotive searches, and where dealerships have the greatest opportunity to be cited
• Gain a framework for aligning your website, content, Google Business Profile, and brand to increase your chances of being cited in Google AI Overviews and platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude

Join this hands-on session to hear how a dealer group turned social media into $40M in sales in 2025 and is tracking 30% higher in 2026 so far. The session will walk dealers through setting up a playbook for their own locations during this highly interactive and customized session.

The text message has been the workhorse of dealership communication for a decade, and it's about to be replaced by something dramatically more powerful. RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the next-generation messaging standard now live on every iPhone and Android device in America, built directly into the native messaging app consumers already use every day. No app download. No new platform to learn. Just an exponentially richer experience delivered in the channel your customers are already in.

Dealership leaders will learn exactly what RCS is in this session, as well as why it matters right now, and how to deploy it in a way that produces measurable results fast. Attendees will see real use cases built specifically for automotive: interactive inventory carousels that let buyers browse vehicles without leaving their messages, one-tap service scheduling with calendar integration, verified brand identities that replace phone numbers with dealership logos, GPS-powered directions to the lot, advisor selection, and real-time two-way conversation, all in a single message thread.

This isn't a "future of technology" session. RCS is live, it's proven, and the dealerships that adopt it in the next 12 months will own a channel advantage their competitors won't be able to close quickly. Come learn what it is, what it can do for your store, and how to launch it before the lot down the street does.

Key Takeaways:

• Explain what RCS is and why it’s different from SMS, MMS, and OTT apps like WhatsApp, and why it matters specifically for automotive retail, and benchmark current SMS and digital engagement performance against RCS performance data to understand the revenue gap being left on the table
• Identify the highest-impact RCS use cases for their dealership across sales, service, and consumer retention, with concrete and immediately applicable examples
• Understand what a dealership needs to launch RCS, and develop a prioritized action plan for piloting RCS at their store or group within 90 days