Your website might be invisible to ChatGPT and nobody at your store would ever know - AEO / GEO Megathread

[clydstone]

Great thread. Thanks for highlighting this, Joe.

We actually ran into this issue back in January and wrote about it here: Found something surprising in dealer pilot testing this week. | Corey Lydstone

At the time I wasn’t naming names, but the platform was Dealer Inspire. Our concern then was Claude: Claude’s live retrieval bot was getting blocked on DI sites by Cloudflare behind the scenes.

We worked through the issue with two dealers and escalated it through DI. To their credit, their support team pushed it up and ultimately got Claude access resolved across DI sites.

I just tested a Maguire VDP again. Both ChatGPT and Claude can open and understand the page with a very basic prompt:

“Open this page and tell me about the contents: ” Grok and Perplexity are still ge...ent="111-111-1111"> Free advice: update those.

 

[carguyfiles]

Great thread. Thanks for highlighting this, Joe.

We actually ran into this issue back in January and wrote about it here: Found something surprising in dealer pilot testing this week. | Corey Lydstone

At the time I wasn’t naming names, but the platform was Dealer Inspire. Our concern then was Claude: Claude’s live retrieval bot was getting blocked on DI sites by Cloudflare behind the scenes.

We worked through the issue with two dealers and escalated it through DI. To their credit, their support team pushed it up and ultimately got Claude access resolved across DI sites.

I just tested a Maguire VDP again. Both ChatGPT and Claude can open and understand the page with a very basic prompt:

“Open this page and tell me about the contents: ” Grok and Perplexity are still getting blocked by Cloudflare. Bummer. And dealers should care. We now spend a lot of time running AI Visibility reporting across the country, both at an industry level and in much more detail for individual dealers. One thing we see consistently: AI systems still rely heavily on marketplaces for inventory information. When an AI agent can easily access Cars.com, Autotrader, CarGurus, etc. but struggles with the dealer’s own VDP, that does the dealer no favors. One more fun thing I noticed buried in the Maguire VDP: <meta property="business:contact_data:email" content="[email protected]"> <meta property="og:email" content="[email protected]"> <meta property="business:contact_data:phone_number" content="111-111-1111"> <meta property="og:phone_number" content="111-111-1111"> Free advice: update those.

@clydstone thanks for the retest and the January backstory. Good to hear DI fixed Claude across their sites once two stores pushed on it. That's the before and after I was hoping someone would post, and it sounds like Grok and Perplexity are still the two to watch.

@JimmyBrown sorry, I missed your post. You don't need any of the jargon to start, and you can run the first test from your phone in five minutes.

Open ChatGPT, paste the link to one used car on your website, and ask: "What's the price, the mileage and the VIN on this car?"

If it reads all three back right, you're ahead of a lot of stores. If it says it can't open the page, or it hands you some other dealer's car, that's the whole problem on one screen, and fixing it is your website company's job. Post what you get and we'll tell you what it means.

 

[Greg_Gifford]

We all keep debating whether artificial intelligence, umm I mean super intelligence (sorry Mr. President), is coming for the BDC.

Meanwhile a buyer in your town is asking ChatGPT where to get a deal on a used Tahoe, and your website might not even be letting it in the door.

Everybody's pitching AEO and GEO right now, aka getting your store to show up in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity answers. None of it matters if the bots can't read your site. And when they can't, nothing on your end tells you.

Two quick checks:

1) Go to yourstore.com/robots.txt and ctrl+F for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. If any of them have Disallow: / under them, or you see User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /, you're locking them out. (GPTBot is the training bot, different conversation.)

2) Pull up a used VDP, view the source (ctrl+U) and ctrl+F the price. Try it with and without the comma. If it's not in there, it's probably getting loaded by javascript, and ChatGPT might be looking at a car with photos and no price.

I wrote up the full 15 minute check, including the firewall piece (that's the sneaky one):

Can ChatGPT and Claude Read Your Dealership Website?

A 15-minute check of whether ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools can read your dealership website: robots.txt, firewalls, JavaScript and VDP text.

autolander.ai

Who's brave enough to try it? Post what you find, even if you pass. And the website and SEO people on here, am I overblowing this or are you seeing it too? This thread is for everyone to discuss their positions on it as well as methods on how to rank.

Just FYI everyone - ChatGPT (and the other LLMs) don't pay attention to robots.txt - tons of tests have proven it - so the bit about checking robots.txt doesn't really apply...

 

[joe.pistell]

We worked through the issue with two dealers and escalated it through DI. To their credit, their support team pushed it up and ultimately got Claude access resolved across DI sites.

I just tested a Maguire VDP again. Both ChatGPT and Claude can open and understand the page with a very basic prompt:

“Open this page and tell me about the contents: ”

DR readers, Corey is good follow: Corey Lydstone - Car Genius AI | LinkedIn

 

[joe.pistell]

Opps,DealerInspire client McGuire is still invisible to AI shoppers:

I asked GPT:
go to this website, can you see this car?
https://www.maguirecars.com/invento...untry-four-wheel-drive-suv-1gns6tkl8tr102668/

[the test failed, I followed with this message]

I followed up with GPT:
if I was car shopping and you were my agent, would this car make it into my consideration set? How many other car dealers have this problem?

This Tahoe could fall out of your consideration set because I cannot inspect it.

As your shopping agent, I need price, mileage, condition, equipment, and location to compare vehicles. If I can verify competing cars but cannot verify this Tahoe, those competitors move forward. Your direct link keeps the Tahoe on the list as “needs verification.” Without that link, I might never surface it.

How many other dealers have this problem? UNKNOWN. This session does not establish an industry rate—or prove that Maguire blocks AI agents.
We observed two different failures:

Observation	What it establishes
Web lookup could not access two Maguire listings	That lookup could not read those pages.
Browser permission check denied the Tahoe request	This browser did not reach the listing. It does not establish a dealer-side block.

For Maguire, the business question is concrete: Can an AI shopping agent discover a vehicle, read its details, and put it into a comparison? If any step fails, the dealer risks losing consideration before the shopper ever visits its website.

See what I’ve been working on

Someone shared part of their work with you.

chatgpt.com

 

[joe.pistell]

dude, the more I look, the more angry I get.
DEAD ENDS EVERYWHERE.

 

[clydstone]

DR readers, Corey is good follow: Corey Lydstone - Car Genius AI | LinkedIn

Thanks Joe! Looking forward to jumping in here more as well.

 

[clydstone]

dude, the more I look, the more angry I get.
DEAD ENDS EVERYWHERE.

Talk about angry... check out what we’ve been seeing with ChatGPT sending shoppers to VDPs on sites like Capital One Auto Navigator instead of directly to the dealer. Agh!!! Is ChatGPT becoming pay-to-play for automotive search? We’ve seen a few examples recently that caught our attention, and dealers should be paying attention too. We can’t say for sure what’s driving… | Corey Lydstone