Real Talk: Why "ChatGPT Audits" are Trash (and What We Actually Built) ( and yes AI helped me write some of this)
I'm reading this article and it could not be timelier. The overall thought expressed is correct, but I have to push back on one thing. The idea that deep, automotive-specific data analysis is "years away" or "impossible" right now? That's just not true. We have already built it. It's called SEO Signal, and we decided to make it free for dealers.
I'm not here to give you a sales pitch. I want to tell you exactly what this actually is—and just as importantly, what it isn't.
The Reality Check: What SEO Signal Actually Does
SEO Signal isn't some "AI chatbot" guessing at your site. It's an inspection engine. We pull the same professional-grade data that agencies pay thousands a month to access, but we run it through a framework that actually understands how a dealership website works. We put it through the top SEO certification programs and fed it several years of automotive-specific SEO articles and research from communities just like this one.
Every report scores eight areas on a transparent 0–100 scale—Technical SEO, On-Page Optimization, Local SEO, Content Strategy, Reviews & Reputation, AI Search Visibility, Page Speed, and Backlinks—with the math shown. A dealer or their vendor can verify every single finding independently. No black boxes.
The article listed specific reasons AI audits fail. Here's how SEO Signal answers every one of them:
"Not Industry-Specific" — This doesn't treat your store like a local bakery or a dentist's office. It understands SRP-to-VDP relationships, OEM compliance, ASC conversion events, city landing page structure, and how platforms like Dealer Inspire, DealerOn, and Jazel actually behave. It was built for this industry from day one.
"Static Snapshots / JavaScript Blindness" — We use crawl infrastructure that renders JavaScript, the same way Google does. If Google can see your dynamic inventory and filters, we see them. If it can't, we flag exactly why. No more AI hallucinating that your inventory page is "missing" when it's sitting right there.
"No Site-Wide Crawl" — Every report maps the structural relationships across your entire site. Internal linking gaps, orphaned pages, the path from your SRP to your VDPs, city page coverage holes—this isn't page-by-page guessing. It's a full picture.
"Performance Blind Spot" — Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) are scored directly in the report using the same data Google uses for ranking signals. If your site is slow, you'll know exactly where and why.
"Zero Analytics Access" — We're building Google Search Console integration right now. When that's live, dealers get verified click data, CTR trends, and impression analysis layered directly into the report alongside the external inspection data. The full picture—outside looking in AND inside looking out.
"Zero Historical Data" — This is where running SEO Signal on a recurring schedule changes the game entirely. Report one is your baseline. Every report after that shows what changed, what improved, what your vendor actually fixed, and what new gaps appeared. Over six months, that timeline becomes the most powerful accountability tool a dealer has ever had.
And one thing the article didn't even mention: AI Search Visibility. We score whether your dealership is showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI answer engines. That's not a "nice to have" anymore—it's where an increasing number of car buyers are starting their research, and almost nobody in automotive is tracking it yet.
What It DOESN'T Do (The Honest Boundaries)
To be clear: this isn't a magic wand.
It doesn't fix the pipes. Like a home inspector, we find the leak, but we aren't the plumbers. Every finding comes with clear ownership—here's what your platform provider should handle, here's what your SEO vendor should fix, here's what you can address directly. We show you what's wrong; they still have to do the work.
It's not an "AI Agency." It doesn't replace a smart SEO partner. It just makes sure the partner you're paying is actually moving the needle. If your vendor is killing it, the report will prove it. We're not looking for fights; we're looking for the truth.
No "Gotcha" games. The data is clinical. Facts, not accusations. The reports let the numbers speak for themselves and dealers draw their own conclusions.
Built to Stand Up to Scrutiny
Here's something we added that I think says a lot about how we approach this: SEO Signal includes an Expert Response feature. When a dealer takes their report to their vendor—and they should—and the vendor pushes back, the system doesn't just roll over or dig in blindly. It evaluates the pushback.
If the expert is right, it accepts the correction. Flat out. "That's a valid point, here's why that finding doesn't apply in this case." No ego, no doubling down on bad data.
But if the pushback is the kind of deflection we've all seen—"oh, that metric doesn't matter," "Google doesn't really care about that," "your traffic is fine, don't worry about rankings"—it holds the line with data. It knows the difference between a legitimate technical counterpoint and a vendor trying to wave away accountability.
I'm not an SEO expert. I've never claimed to be. But I built this system by studying the experts, feeding it years of industry-specific knowledge, and pressure-testing it against real vendor objections. The goal was simple: a dealer should never feel outgunned in a conversation about their own website. The report should be able to stand in the room with any SEO professional and hold its own.
Why Weekly Monitoring Changes Everything
A one-time audit is a snapshot. Running this weekly is where the real power shows up:
Vendor accountability becomes automatic. We flag an issue in Week 1, your vendor says they'll handle it, and Week 4's report shows whether they actually did. No more taking anyone's word for it.
You catch regressions before they cost you. A platform update breaks your schema. A page gets accidentally deindexed. Title tags get overwritten in a CMS update. Weekly monitoring catches these in days, not three months later when you're wondering why traffic dropped.
Competitive movement is visible in real time. If a competitor in your market publishes new content, builds new backlinks, or gains visibility—you know about it before it starts pulling shoppers away from your lot.
You build a paper trail that changes the conversation. After a few months of documented findings, recommendations, and outcomes, the dynamic between a dealer and their vendor shifts permanently. You're not asking "are you doing your job?" anymore. You're showing them the data and saying "let's talk about this."
The Content Problem: Why Our Free Blogs Are Different
Most "SEO content" for dealers is garbage—cookie-cutter posts about "Spring Car Care" that could be about a shop in Maine or Malibu. That content doesn't rank because Google has gotten smart enough to know the difference.
Our system finds actual local search gaps and builds content backward from real demand. If people in Fairfax are searching for the CX-90 but no local dealer is talking about I-66 commutes, Virginia-specific tax incentives, or cargo space for Costco runs off Braddock Road—that's what we generate. Every article references your specific highways, neighborhoods, weather conditions, and state programs.
A national website can never write that content. A generic AI blog generator won't either. Hyper-local is the only content that consistently wins in local search now, and we include it because dealers shouldn't have to pay $500 a post for something their data already told us to write.
The Bottom Line
I get the skepticism. Generic AI has given "automated audits" a bad name, and rightfully so. But the solution isn't to fly blind or just "trust the process" for another five years while writing checks you can't verify.
The data is out there. We just finally put it into a format that dealers can use without needing to become SEO experts themselves. It's free because you shouldn't have to pay a gatekeeper just to find out if your own website is working.
If you want to see your store's actual signal, reach out. The data doesn't lie.
— Don | Contactter | contactter.com
