Stop Chasing Ghosts: Why AI "Audits" Are a Waste of Dealer Resources

[douglaskarr]

Not a week goes by without a dealership reaching out that asked ChatGPT to "audit" their site, providing us with a list of imaginary problems. We look at the pasted results, then we look at our dashboards, and the AI is just flat-out wrong—claiming inventory is missing, filters don't work, or VDPs are gone when they are sitting right there. Using a generalist AI for a technical automotive audit isn't just inefficient; it’s a complete waste of time that creates fires where there is no smoke.

Here are reasons why AI engines consistently fail the Dealership Website Audit:

• Not Industry-Specific: Lacks the specialized logic for automotive retail, OEM compliance, and dealer-specific lead funnels.
• Static Snapshots: Cannot account for real-time inventory churn, daily DMS feed updates, or live price changes.
• JavaScript Blindness: Frequently fails to "see" or render the dynamic inventory and interactive filters that power modern SRPs.
• No Site-Wide Crawl: Analyzes pages in a vacuum rather than mapping the critical relationship between inventory lists and individual VDPs.
• Performance Blind Spot: Cannot measure real-world load times or Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are vital for ranking.
• Zero Analytics Access: Offers surface-level UX advice without seeing actual user behavior, bounce rates, or lead conversion data.
• Zero Historical Data: Has no access to your site’s past performance, seasonal trends, or year-over-year traffic shifts, making it impossible to spot actual regressions.
• And that's off the top of my head.

To be clear, it’s not that AI can’t eventually do this—it’s that it isn’t doing it now.

To get a real, actionable audit from an LLM, you would have to manually feed it every ounce of your Google Search Console data, years of Analytics behavior, a full technical site crawl report, and every single one of your live pages. Then, you’d have to evaluate this against your competitors just to provide context. Only then could it begin to evaluate your true performance.

The reality? That kind of seamless, deep-data integration for the automotive sector isn't happening any time soon. I'm not saying AI can't surface some opportunities, but asking a general AI to audit your dealership is a recipe for false positives and wasted hours.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Not a week goes by without a dealership reaching out that asked ChatGPT to "audit" their site, providing us with a list of imaginary problems. We look at the pasted results, then we look at our dashboards, and the AI is just flat-out wrong—claiming inventory is missing, filters don't work, or VDPs are gone when they are sitting right there. Using a generalist AI for a technical automotive audit isn't just inefficient; it’s a complete waste of time that creates fires where there is no smoke.

@douglaskarr, Clearly your dealers are raising concerns about their websites and:
1. The results aren't accurate
2. Sounds like they really don't understand whats been given to them by the AI platform and they're not verifying the data.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go to your team / dev's and see what you can do to get ahead of it???
With some of the suggestions you provided in your post, pull some of that data from your database, send it to an AI platform for the dealer and let it do the assessment and you guys drop a weekly or monthly site report back to the dealership?

OR...

With more resources, add a section in the back of the site that the dealer can go to thats powered by AI and the dealer can ask a question about the site performance, how does this page's SEO look, which pages on my website get the most visits, which used cars get the most visits, which cars has the highest engagement, which vehicles / models have performed the best of the past 90 days, etc....

Clearly your dealers are talking to you about something thats important to them. (Based on your post, on a weekly basis)
The question is, are you taking what they're saying as a complaint or an opportunity!

 

[DjSec]

Not a week goes by without a dealership reaching out that asked ChatGPT to "audit" their site, providing us with a list of imaginary problems. We look at the pasted results, then we look at our dashboards, and the AI is just flat-out wrong—claiming inventory is missing, filters don't work, or VDPs are gone when they are sitting right there.

AI invents problems when given incomplete context. Just like a junior developer.

When AI is given:

• full site crawl
• rendered HTML
• analytics
• GSC export

It can identify real issues like:

• duplicate VDP titles
• orphan inventory pages
• CLS shifts
• schema errors

That’s provable.

AI for a technical automotive audit isn't just inefficient; it’s a complete waste of time that creates fires where there is no smoke.

Dealership sites are not special snowflakes.

They are:

• product listings
• location pages
• lead forms

AI already audits e-commerce sites like Shopify stores daily.

They use the same web stack problems as every other JS-heavy site.

• Not Industry-Specific: Lacks the specialized logic for automotive retail, OEM compliance, and dealer-specific lead funnels.

AI becomes industry-specific when you feed it OEM rules, SRP/VDP logic, and VIN schema. That’s not a limitation of AI it’s a limitation of vague prompts.

• Static Snapshots: Cannot account for real-time inventory churn, daily DMS feed updates, or live price changes.

Inventory churn doesn’t stop AI from auditing structure. Duplicate VIN URLs, orphan VDPs, crawl traps, and schema errors exist regardless of real-time updates.

• JavaScript Blindness: Frequently fails to "see" or render the dynamic inventory and interactive filters that power modern SRPs.

AI can’t render JS on its own, but rendered crawls from Screaming Frog or Playwright solve that. The issue is incomplete inputs, not AI capability.

• No Site-Wide Crawl: Analyzes pages in a vacuum rather than mapping the critical relationship between inventory lists and individual VDPs.

AI needs crawl exports, just like any audit tool. When given a full crawl, it maps SRP-to-VDP relationships very effectively.

• Performance Blind Spot: Cannot measure real-world load times or Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are vital for ranking.

AI doesn’t replace CWV tools it interprets their results. Feed it Lighthouse or CrUX exports and it identifies real performance problems quickly.

• Zero Analytics Access: Offers surface-level UX advice without seeing actual user behavior, bounce rates, or lead conversion data.

Analytics access is a permissions issue, not an AI limitation. Export funnel data and AI can analyze conversion paths quickly.

• Zero Historical Data: Has no access to your site’s past performance, seasonal trends, or year-over-year traffic shifts, making it impossible to spot actual regressions.

Historical data is available through exports. AI is actually very strong at identifying trends once given time-series data.

To be clear, it’s not that AI can’t eventually do this—it’s that it isn’t doing it now.

What specific audit tasks do you think AI cannot do today?

To get a real, actionable audit from an LLM, you would have to manually feed it every ounce of your Google Search Console data, years of Analytics behavior, a full technical site crawl report, and every single one of your live pages. Then, you’d have to evaluate this against your competitors just to provide context. Only then could it begin to evaluate your true performance.

Every audit tool needs inputs. The question is how much data is required to produce useful insights.

With just a full crawl export and Lighthouse reports, AI already finds duplicate VIN pages, orphan VPDs, schema errors, CLS issues, and crawl traps on dealer sites.

Analytics and long-term history refine the analysis, but they aren’t required to produce actionable findings today.

The reality? That kind of seamless, deep-data integration for the automotive sector isn't happening any time soon. I'm not saying AI can't surface some opportunities, but asking a general AI to audit your dealership is a recipe for false positives and wasted hours.

Deep integration isn’t required to get useful audit results. With crawl exports, Lighthouse reports, and Search Console data, AI already identifies duplicate VIN pages, orphan VPDs, schema issues, and CLS problems on dealer sites today. False positives usually come from incomplete inputs, not from AI itself.

 

[craigh]

False positives usually come from incomplete inputs, not from AI itself.

I think the point is that AI provides conclusions with incomplete inputs - that's the complaint.
The average dealer is not going to go through any of the trouble you outlined, they're just going to ask ChatGPT to audit their website because someone on LinkedIN shared a prompt for it.

This is a major flaw of AI right now that does need to be addressed - if you're using vanilla ChatGPT you're going to get answers that sound conclusive but are based on nothing more than snapshots of information. The number of times I toggle research on and get "You're absolutely right, I neglected to consider X" type responses is a constant reminder that while AI can help a tonne on the workload side, the knowledge side still needs strict controls.

 

[DjSec]

I think the point is that AI provides conclusions with incomplete inputs - that's the complaint.
The average dealer is not going to go through any of the trouble you outlined, they're just going to ask ChatGPT to audit their website because someone on LinkedIN shared a prompt for it.

This is a major flaw of AI right now that does need to be addressed - if you're using vanilla ChatGPT you're going to get answers that sound conclusive but are based on nothing more than snapshots of information. The number of times I toggle research on and get "You're absolutely right, I neglected to consider X" type responses is a constant reminder that while AI can help a tonne on the workload side, the knowledge side still needs strict controls.

I agree, confident answers from incomplete inputs are a real problem not just with AI but with any audit tool.

Someone needs to create an AI audit tool that refuses to run without proper data. An AI tool that requires crawl exports, Search Console data, or Lighthouse reports before producing conclusions. When AI is used with proper inputs, it consistently finds real issues. When it’s used with vague prompts, it produces noise.

That’s a UX problem that needs to be solved however it is not proof that AI audits don’t work.

 

[joe.pistell]

To get a real, actionable audit from an LLM,

The secret sauce is HOW you define the challenge. If the audit is not D.I.S.C. focused, then it'll deliver little value.

Uncle Joe's Audit been under construction for a few months. Its 100% focused on D.I.S.C.
Private beta to a small group of pioneering dealers or Vendors I trust (NDA too

 

[douglaskarr]

@douglaskarr, Clearly your dealers are raising concerns about their websites and:
1. The results aren't accurate
2. Sounds like they really don't understand whats been given to them by the AI platform and they're not verifying the data.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go to your team / dev's and see what you can do to get ahead of it???
With some of the suggestions you provided in your post, pull some of that data from your database, send it to an AI platform for the dealer and let it do the assessment and you guys drop a weekly or monthly site report back to the dealership?

OR...

With more resources, add a section in the back of the site that the dealer can go to thats powered by AI and the dealer can ask a question about the site performance, how does this page's SEO look, which pages on my website get the most visits, which used cars get the most visits, which cars has the highest engagement, which vehicles / models have performed the best of the past 90 days, etc....

Clearly your dealers are talking to you about something thats important to them. (Based on your post, on a weekly basis)
The question is, are you taking what they're saying as a complaint or an opportunity!

Absolutely agree that it's important - that's why I posted it here.

• I'm not optimistic we'll get ahead of the AI industry's buzz and the hundreds of billions of dollars it has... but we're definitely educating our clients that these systems are deficient in addressing the issue and how they can work around them.
• Your "OR" is absolutely dead on... we have been expanding our reporting to provide exceptional, tailored insight into what DEALERS need. We recently piped in all GBP data and reporting for our dealers and are adding more third-party integrations each month. Our goal is to provide a user experience and relevant data to help car dealers truly understand where their investments are working so they can focus on growing their business rather than getting mired in reporting and AI results that don't matter.

Appreciate the feedback!

 

[douglaskarr]

The secret sauce is HOW you define the challenge. If the audit is not D.I.S.C. focused, then it'll deliver little value.

Uncle Joe's Audit been under construction for a few months. Its 100% focused on D.I.S.C.
Private beta to a small group of pioneering dealers or Vendors I trust (NDA too

That's fantastic... I can't wait to see more tools like this hit the industry... tailored, trained, and modeled after this industry! And I believe vendors should absolutely be open to integrating to them. As someone who has trained models before, I know just how complex this process can be. Congratulations! Be sure to share to everyone where they can find out more information.