• This thread is just the tip of the iceberg.The people ahead of the curve aren't Googling for answers — they're already in here, having the conversations you haven't found yet. DealerRefresh is free.Get the full picture →

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

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.
 

✨ AI Highlights

Dealers may be unknowingly blocking AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity from reading their vehicle pages, meaning when shoppers paste a dealer's VDP link into an AI assistant, the bot redirects them to Autotrader or CarGurus instead. The thread uses Dealer Inspire sites as a live case study, revealing that Cloudflare's security layer blocks the live-fetch bots (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User) even when crawlers are permitted — a problem dealers can't see or fix themselves, requiring action from DI. A contributor confirmed Claude access was previously resolved across DI sites after escalation, though Grok and Perplexity remain blocked.

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