Joe, this is pretty amazing! Tons of runway for something like this to run and a great prompt. Thanks man!!

@DealerInt @joe.pistell @DjSec

SRPs are NOT the problem. Your legacy vendor is.

The reality we have to face is that OEMs and legacy vendors (like Cox/Dealer.com and CDK) have decided that harvesting third-party customer data is more valuable than actually selling whips.

I just ran a deep architectural sweep on a competing legacy site. Before a customer even clicks on a vehicle, the machine drops 11 server-side cookies, captures exact GPS coordinates, drops network fingerprint hashes, and runs 4 separate GTM containers. They are strip-mining local, dealer-paid traffic to feed their national data ecosystems.

And dealers wonder why their ad spend is bleeding out while their SRPs choke on a 10.7-second load time and an "E" performance grade.

I got so tired of this deception that I walked out of my GSM role last month and built the infrastructure myself. No bloat. No third-party data extraction. Just a clean, headless, server-rendered Next.js architecture.

Getting a 100/100/100/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights on an image-heavy SRP is not hard. It is actually basic math if you just ditch the tracking cookies and offload the animations to the GPU.

We just pushed a live inventory SRP this morning. The empirical math:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 1.2s
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): 40ms
• Lighthouse: 100 / 100 / 100 / 100

Gregg is right. You can't just change the test until you pass. Google's standards are the only ones that matter, and 99% of the industry is technically insolvent.

The "shiny shell" era is dead. If your platform isn't hitting sub-1.5s LCPs and passing Core Web Vitals, you don't own your digital retail infrastructure—you are just renting a slow, legally hazardous data-brokerage from a vendor who is using your own traffic against you.

The math doesn't care about their excuses.

Trent Sliefert
Founder, Darkhorse Data Solutions LLC

DealerInt said:

Joe’s audit hits the mark—the SRP is the single biggest point of friction today. It’s where legacy vendors hide their 'value-add' scripts that do nothing but tank the DOM and drive up the Discovery Tax.

If we want to stay relevant, we have to move past the 'shiny shell' era of website design. The real battle is at the bottom of the funnel:

Data Accessibility: Implementing SSR so AI and crawlers can actually read a listing without a manual 'scrape.'

Frictionless Discovery: Bypassing the SRP 'gatekeeper' and sending traffic directly to the VDP Source of Truth.

Click to expand...

#Respect

DMS_LEAD said:

That's just off the top of my head

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Got it, this could be great for indie dealers in the US.

DMS_LEAD said:

I stumbled in on a joke that nobody's sharing?

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Dude, the DMS in the dealership is the 800lb gorilla that no one can get out of the building. Tekion, a multi-billion $ startup, run by Tesla's ex CTO has been hard at work for a decade building a new DMS. Tell us about what you are building.

oh oh... . MS + Free Trial =

One thing I've done to adapt to 2026 SEO and LLMs is to consider each page (other than the SRP) as a Landing Page. Google's AI overview, in particular, right now just wants answers and so traffic may not necessarily come through the front door like it has in the past.

Knowing that we need to move away from basic 'templated' secondary pages that only focus on that content. Instead I'm including inventory on the "We Buy Cars" page because I don't know how they got there but maybe they haven't see the dealer's inventory yet. I see too many dealership pages where the finance page is just the dang credit app and NO TRUST factors shown. Or About Us is a boring generic paragraph with fill in the blanks for that one dealership. That's not good enough (never has been really)

This goes for VDPs as well. Someone mentions all car sites have the same exact data on them, that's true. So we are including additonal sections like "Why Buy From Us" content, the google map pack and dealership info, even Customer Testimonials, etc. A car buyer has more ways than ever to see your cars without visiting your website... so when they finally do land there the content on the page should sell them on the WHY US instead of assuming there is already trust there.

Lastly, building out more filtered inventory pages like "[body style] for sale in [city]" with relevant, relatable, local content and some FAQs instead of just a filtered list of vehicles. LLMs need REASONS to choose you...

Great thread, I'm playing catchup here. Gregg's buzzword takedown should be printed on a plaque and hung in every vendor office (my company included).

The ground floor comments are spot on. We're in here debating AI-ready VDPs and RAG pipelines while most dealers can't tell you if their NAP is consistent across 50 directories. The majority of the time I talk to dealers about SEO their GBP is not optimized, just claimed and abandoned like a New Year's gym membership. Local citations a mess. Core Web Vitals failing. Canonicals broken. Most aren't ready for "Make us show up in LLMs" and most don't want to stretch before a workout.

Once the basics are actually handled, content is where leverage lives. We use Hrizn with our clients. Best content OS in the space and I'm not being polite or pitchy. Their Dealer DNA components are the real deal. They're not generating another soulless Silverado blog post that reads like it was written by a chatbot with a thesaurus. They're building content tied to YOUR store, YOUR market, YOUR identity. With the March spam update live, every dealer running copy-paste content across 12 rooftops has gotta be rethinkin' their content strategy.

Where I'd really push this thread selfishly... the biggest problem in automotive isn't content or infrastructure. It's that every dealership's context lives in the GM's gut and gets distributed via vibes and monthly vendor phone calls (if they make them). 25+ SaaS platforms all operating in silos. Website vendor gets one story. Ad agency gets another. BDC is out there freelancing. We've been running on gut-distributed context for 30 years and calling it a digital strategy.

What could soon replace gut is a context or intelligence syndication layer. Capture what makes the dealership unique, update in real time, and push it everywhere. The dealers who win next won't be the ones with the most tools. They'll be the ones whose intelligence is actually organized and accessible instead of trapped in one person's head or gut. There are tons of providers building this layer into THEIR applications. To me, that's the same walled garden problem we've struggled with in this industry for the last 25 years. Every vendor wants to be the brain. Nobody wants to be the nervous system. Content, Ads, comms could all be leverage and operate harmoniously.

What's missing is a single context engine that syndicates intelligence out to every provider AND pulls the invisible stuff back in. Training data. Cross-platform comms. API usage and cost. Inventory. The operational signal that's actually driving output and nobody's monitoring because it's buried across 30 logins nobody opens. Who knows. This is moving so fast it's tough to keep up.

I've kept a running list here: Photo Providers

You're playing in some deep murky waters hunting for a test dealer on a DMS system. Who do you view as your competition?

This thread is pretty amazing. Despite the overly technical conversation for the average dealer, you guys are proving that a new breed of SEO considerations needs to be understood.

There is no doubt SEO is climbing the importance ladder because of AI, and your posts will be found for many months/years to come.

AI report from main street.
I am doing work my imagination always could visualise but was so complex I never made it to 1st base.

Every week, I have many holy shit moments. I'm in another one right now.

joe.pistell said:

Remember what I said, the more complex the task, the more prone it is to 'hallucinations'. Amiee's example is complex.

AI struggles with complex MATH calculations. ALWAYS VERIFY.

Click to expand...

And... here we are, ONE YEAR LATER...​

WOW, AI is sooooo far ahead of the limitations it had one year ago. Back then, AI was a 6th grader. Today, AI is a masters graduate that is your personal intern.

What is you ONE YEAR FORECAST?
Main street hasn't fully embraced AI yet. At this current pace, where will AI be next year?

I have to give you massive credit here, your diagnosis of the legacy tech bloat is spot on. A 70% 'Poor' PageSpeed rating across the industry is embarrassing, and building a clean, SSR-first infrastructure with pristine schema is exactly what the industry needs to fix the crawl budget issues. I am genuinely looking forward to seeing those technical benchmarks for @DealerInt.

Where I think the architecture still hits a wall is your assumption about how non-Google models acquire data, specifically regarding retail velocity versus index churn.

You mentioned that GMC feeds and SSR schema are how Perplexity and OpenAI 'know' a car arrived. GMC is fantastic for Google's ecosystem, but Google isn't sharing that structured feed with OpenAI or Anthropic. For those models to discover inventory without an aggregator, they are entirely reliant on their own web crawlers hitting your SSR schema.

Even with a lightning fast site, standard web crawling is fundamentally incompatible with automotive retail velocity. While an average unit might sit for 30 to 60 days, the highly desirable, aggressively priced inventory....the exact cars users are actively querying AI for, often move in a matter of days. If a foundational model's crawler only indexes a specific VDP once a week, the AI is going to confidently send shoppers to 404 pages and sold vehicles. Models cannot tolerate that level of hallucination risk.

The 'Aggregator Tax' isn't just a visibility tax; it's a data-licensing reality. Foundational models are striking massive enterprise data deals with centralized hubs precisely because they need a real-time API firehose, not because they want to rely on crawling decentralized local domains, no matter how fast or clean your pipe is.

I completely agree that your infrastructure will absolutely crush legacy platforms on standard Google crawlability. But until OpenAI decides to trust and query thousands of decentralized MCP endpoints instead of buying a clean, normalized data feed from a centralized network, the aggregators still hold the keys to the non-Google LLM intelligence layers.

DealerInt said:

Joe, you’re right on discovery, but you’re describing the Aggregator Tax model. Global discovery and local execution are two different steps.

Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic already handle global discovery (Top-of-Funnel) through their own web-scale indexes. They don't need to ping 18,000 dealers; they just need a direct handshake with the 5–10 local results that actually matter to the user.

That’s why Bright Data, Arcade.dev (WebMCP), and Hrizn are so critical—they provide the "Bottom-of-Funnel" execution layer.

Discovery tells an agent where a car might be; MCP proves it is there and lets them act. I’d rather give the "keys to the data" back to the dealer via the new W3C WebMCP standard than keep them locked in a centralized hub. Are we building for the aggregators, or for the dealers?

Click to expand...

I’m genuinely glad to see Horizon having success. Frankly, we're essentially the only two players in auto actually helping dealers solve this new AI/SEO visibility problem right now. We just go about it differently, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We both want to kill the Aggregator Tax.

But architecturally, your premise has a massive Catch-22.

You mentioned in your first post that legacy platforms are blocking non-standard bots. If Perplexity and Anthropic are blocked from crawling, how do their "web-scale indexes" magically know a red SUV arrived yesterday to put that dealer in the top 5 results?

They don't. They rely on search APIs, which rely on centralized, structured feeds. If a dealer skips the central hub and relies purely on AI bots bypassing legacy blocks to crawl their site, they’ll be invisible.

WebMCP is an incredibly exciting future for bottom-of-funnel execution, but let’s be real, it’s still highly experimental. Consumer AI agents aren't natively configured today to wander onto a local site, read an llms.txt, ingest a manifest on the fly, and autonomously execute tool calls.

We can't sell dealers on bypassing centralized discovery today just because WebMCP is the future. An elegant MCP manifest doesn't matter if the AI never knocks on the door because it didn't know the car was there to begin with. Global discovery first, local execution second.

I’d love to connect and see exactly how you guys have engineered around this discovery hurdle in the wild, or let me know if you’re planning on dropping a white paper detailing your approach!

DealerInt said:

You're 100% right that a static llms.txt is the wrong bucket for a 500-unit live feed. My point was more about using the llms.txt as the map rather than the pipe.

In a perfect setup, the llms.txt file points the agent to a dynamic discovery endpoint or an MCP manifest. That way, when an agent hits the site, it knows exactly where the 'live' documentation and toolsets live without having to guess via a standard crawl.

As for the Google documentation—there isn't an 'official' Google stamp on WebMCP for local inventory yet. It’s still very much in the proposal/early preview stage (as Ryan mentioned earlier). The reason it's exciting isn't because it replaces Merchant Center today, but because it offers a path for 'in-browser' agents to interact with a dealer's data directly, potentially bypassing the delays and 'data taxes' often imposed by the big listing aggregators and legacy website providers.

We’re essentially talking about the difference between Google indexing a feed and an AI Agent executing a search on the dealer's behalf. It’s a nuances shift, but a big one.

Click to expand...

You're talking about bottom-of-funnel execution, but you're completely skipping top-of-funnel discovery. An in-browser agent isn't going to sequentially ping 18,000 individual dealer WebMCP endpoints to find a red SUV; the latency would be absurd. It’s going to ping a centralized, normalized third-party data hub. You can build the most elegant MCP manifest in the world, but if the agent doesn't already know your specific dealership holds the inventory via the primary search index or a major aggregator, it’s never going to show up to read your llms.txt map in the first place.

How exactly are you planning to pass a live, 500-vehicle inventory feed with real-time pricing updates through a static llm.txt file, and can you point to any documentation where Google states they use WebMCP to index local inventory for AI Overviews rather than standard Merchant feeds?

DealerInt said:

While building out some new features for my own dealer SaaS project recently, I’ve run into exactly what Matt mentioned: legacy platforms stripping rich schema and blocking agents that aren't 'standard' Google bots. It’s a massive barrier for dealers who actually want to be 'the quotable source.'

To Gregg’s point about a 'testing ground'—I’d be interested in sharing some of the raw data I’m seeing regarding how AI engines are actually consuming (or failing to consume) different types of dealership inventory feeds. If we’re moving toward a conversational paradigm where a shopper asks, 'Find me a red SUV with 3rd row seating under $35k,' the dealer who wins isn't the one with the best blog—it's the one whose data isn't being throttled by their own provider.

Has anyone else here tried to force-inject a custom LLM.txt or WebMCP toolset onto a legacy dealer site yet, or are most of you just waiting for the providers to catch up?"

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Greg_Gifford said:

Hey moderators (@Jeff Kershner @Alex Snyder) - that post from aellycarter from Saturday is total spam - they edited the LandingGarage quoted post to insert a link to "botox in Queens" - probably ought to get that deleted...

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Thanks Greg - that one has been completely zapped and banned.

The SEO narrative in automotive has gotten detached from reality. There are only 2 providers actually solving this problem....OneKeel and Horizon. We both do it differently but....there is only two that actually know what we are doing and aren't making up how to solve for this.

There’s a growing trend of oversimplifying the problem, positioning simple automation and dashboards as if they solve systemic visibility challenges. They don’t.

Modern search isn’t a content posting problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.

If you’re not operating with a full-stack content engine, one that includes:

• programmatic content generation at scale
• originality and de-duplication controls (not recycled LLM output)
• a unified intelligence layer informed by real dealership data
• integrated RAG pipelines for contextual accuracy
• continuous learning loops tied to performance signals
• and orchestration across all channels and endpoints

…then you’re not solving SEO. You’re just producing more noise, and content that does nothing to move the needle.

Schema alone isn’t a strategy.
Dealer-written content isn’t scalable.
Social posts don’t move organic search in any meaningful way.

Without a connected system that aligns data, content, and distribution in real time, results will be inconsistent at best, and misleading at worst.

The industry needs to stop pretending otherwise.

I'll be interested to see how this plays out.