on this episode of Three Key Insights. Complete the sentence, life is like a box of… Chocolates. Yes, because Forrest Gump said so.
Now, honestly, chocolate, why not? Full of surprises, life of happiness, love. I mean, there’s so many concepts which we could stack into this box. Chocolate would be probably the least interesting one, except…
I was going to say broccoli, but it was not good. The auto industry is moving fast and it’s getting more complex. Success today takes more than instinct. It takes insight.
Welcome to Three Key Insights with Sanjeev Yashna, president of Capital One Auto. Today, Sanjeev welcomes leading AI technologist, Lutz Finger, to break down AI search and how car buyers are finding dealerships differently and what dealerships can do now to take the lead. You know, it’s fascinating to speak with not only a person, who is involved in academics and not only who has worked in different companies, but you actually have created companies and then you’ve written books on this. And so you’ve got this practical bent on what’s going on and how the thing is changing.
But let’s take it step by step because we are talking to an audience who, in my experience, and I’ve worked in many industries over 50 countries around the world, in my experience, the auto dealer owners and principals are the best entrepreneurs on the planet. You know, it’s a highly intense business. It’s a cash flow, compete every day, get the customers in, then convert them. It’s a servicing business.
It’s a highly intense business, but it doesn’t work. Unless you can bring the customers in. And so because they are focused on so many parts of the business, I would love to today educate our great entrepreneurs in the auto space in the field of AI and how that is changing things because we see that more people are searching, not using the normal search methodologies, but using AI. But before we go there, can you spend a little, a little bit of time talking about SEO?
Why that changed the world as a bit of a foundation before we start moving towards generative search optimization and why that is different? I think there are two big topics which are changing for the dealerships and both have something to do with AI. One is on the SEO geospace. How do you get people into the actual space?
The other one is how do you manage your operations? Also there is AI, very helpful. So let’s step back and let’s do one by one. Let’s go SEO, GEO first.
So SEO, search engine optimization. There was a time where we did not have the internet. My kids don’t remember that, but I do actually. I’m now dating myself here.
Remember that time. Now the internet came around, and people are suddenly are allowed to open a front door online. And that meant they became searchable. Before that, car dealerships were just the car dealership down the road.
And you put something up, a flag or something to draw attention for whoever drove by. Now, if you in the internet world now wanted to sell a car, you became comparable. People can search and have a way better view about which car they want to buy, who is offering what deal. Meaning the internet made the earth way more flat and way more comparable.
The main vehicle here for customers was search. And I mean, I can like funny story for your car dealership audience. I’m German as you can undoubtedly have figured out by now, as I came to the US, I needed a car. And I’m a data scientist.
So what do I do? I did not go to a car dealership. No, I scraped sites, figured out from all the dealers in the area, like which car I wanted. And then I went to the, like I visited three dealers and I bought the car, which like essentially within 24 hours because, well, I’m fresh in the country.
I need a car, right? So, that level of you go, you scrape, that’s what Google is doing. Later on, Google said, we allow you advertisements. Now, advertisements became cheaper if more customers knew you, meaning the way you presented yourself to Google became very important because it as well reduced your marketing costs.
That is the SEO world. Right, and so dealers also became really good at this because it’s the keyword, search, and buy, and that’s it. And so, you know, the keyword search and all of that stuff, and to get the customers in, they had to become better and better at it. There were some companies that helped them with it, but I think the auto dealership world has become very adept at using SEO.
Yes. Right now. And they have to, however, and now here’s the good news for your listeners. The SEO game is a well-known game, right?
We’re playing this since 20 years. You know how to create the right keywords. You know how Google looks at you. Sure, Google changes the algorithm.
It’s not that easy, but it’s a game with clear rules. Now here comes AI and suddenly we’re changing the rules. And that is the reason why everybody should now actually invest into it because we have now new rules in this setup. Let me walk you through what GEO means.
I gave you a little bit of a tour of the SEO world. I gave you the example. I come to the US and obviously I need a car. That did not just happen.
I just didn’t board a plane and flew into the US. I prepared, I got my passports, I packed. I thought about what do I need. I organized my house away.
And in the whole time I was doing this, I used Google. So if Google would have saved all my queries, they would have known that I’m leaving Germany, and going to the US. Now Google at that time didn’t keep any data like from any search queries alive, right? They kind of like every time you go to Google, it’s the same Google as if you have never went to the Google at that time.
But that’s different now. So we have now those chat bots and we can talk to chat bots. And those chat bots gives you answers. Meaning now, if you don’t search, you start planning for your trip to the US.
What else? Oh, like think about to stop by Sanjeev to get a car. Given that you have that family size, I would recommend this type of car. And by the way, you’re going to the Bay Area.
Do not ever think about buying a German car because like it’s it’s not that common. Rather, think about Honda and Toyota was very common at that time as I came. Now, suddenly the chatbot is giving me a recommendation and the chatbot knows what to tell to me because it knows all my background. So that recommendation lands actually extremely well.
And so let’s dive into this area. I know that you pointed out the two areas. One is in the search and the others in operations. Let’s really focus in on the search part.
Yes. So now. That being the case and the fact that people are going to be searching for cars in a different way. Yes.
How does from a dealer’s perspective, a dealer sitting with his or her inventory and they want to present it to customers. They want it to be presented to customers whenever they are looking for a car. What are the what do they need to do today? That you were not doing yesterday.
Yes. You’ll be able to come up on the start. So can you describe the start for us? So, you know, how does the start algorithm, how does air work when you start me?
What does it look for? Perfect. Maybe before and before we do this, let me start me explain the magnitude why this is so important. So I did some research.
I would say, okay, I let people start. Sorry. search for a keyword, and then I bring them the results. So let’s say I go to the US, I want to buy a car, I type in Honda Odyssey, and then I get a list of Honda Odysseys nearby, right?
Or I would get a site like Kelley Blue Book or whatsoever who trying to aggregate this. And then I have to search, I have to look at the pictures, right? I would do two test groups. I would test people with this kind of search, the traditional search, how your dealers know it.
And then I would do another site where I, instead of letting the user search for a keyword, I would say when people write Honda Odyssey, I would be a little bit more explanatory and saying, okay, well, that’s this type of car, it’s a seven seater, you can have so many people in it, this is your options, here are three, four different, dealerships which carry Honda Odysseys at the price and how close they are to you. And then I would look at conversion rate. So I would do this live, right? And I can tell you the conversion rate, and this is the important part, from search to buy, and I have the full chain, the conversion rate is for some cases, five times higher, 500% higher.
Now, the thing is that social proof does not live anymore. In the bar next door with your old customers, that lives now in an engine, which is Chachapiti or Gemini or whatsoever. Now, how do those engines work? Those engines are word completions.
They are like, if I ask you Sanjeev, like, let’s do it, complete the sentence, life is like a box of? Chocolates. Yes, because Forrest Gump said so. Now, honestly, chocolate, why not?
Full of surprises, life of happiness, love. I mean, there’s so many concepts which we could stuck into this box. Chocolate would be probably the least interesting one. Except- I was going to say broccoli, but it was not good.
Broccoli, nice. Now, why would any completion engine do it? Because most people say life is like a box of chocolates. It’s an internet name.
So, if I say that I have a new job, I have a new job. If people complete sentences, the best car for you to drive, if you are a father of a family of five, is now what is the car? Where do the engines get this information from? They look online.
They see in all the chat groups what people say. So your customer for the dealership is no longer the customer who goes to the local bar, joint, hangout, bowling club, whatever, have a discussion and saying, oh, you’re driving a Ford. I want to have a Ford. That’s not anymore happening.
They go and talk to a chatbot, and the chatbot completes the sentence with, it’s the F-150, because everybody is talking to you. Meaning, how do now? Your dealers who have a personalized experience with their customers, how do they transfer this out into the world? And that’s actually relatively straightforward.
They have to make that experience digitalized and experienceable. Your dealers know, I mean, they are amazing entrepreneurs, as you said, and they know their customers very well. Make sure that those customer interactions are public. Maybe they have a chat group.
Maybe they have a WhatsApp group. Maybe they have a channel where they talk to people. Because what the models are looking for is life is like a box of everybody says chocolate, so it should be chocolate. Now, if everybody says the best dealer you can go to is Sanjeev, that’s what you want to have out there.
Let me kind of take a step back and talk about this. You know, I think it’s important. I think it’s important to pull it all together, the things that you’ve said, and then you can build on it. So basically what you’re saying is once upon a time, the information that Google would use for their SEO, et cetera, and then they would do, you know, keyword searches and you could pay for it and so on and so forth.
That was one version of doing it. AI actually uses all the contextual information that is out there. And if it is not available to it. It will not be able to use it to make its next word or to help in the search.
So dealerships have a whole bunch of data. But to the extent that, and let me break it out into two chunks and then you can talk about it. One is the data that they have. One is the data of other people talking about the dealership.
So let’s talk about the information they have. Customers coming to them, interactions that are happening. The more that that information is being shared. The more that that information can be available to the AI tools.
When there’s a general question that is asked, the tool will try to, will be more leaning towards, you know, exposing their information of themselves to the person searching. If you’re a dealership and you kind of like heard, okay, life is like a box of chocolate. Let me, let me go out and make many, pages saying the best car dealer is. And that’s probably not going to work because all of those sentences are essentially meaning nothing because they’re not contextualized.
They’re not in the SEO game important. So each of them needs to be important. Meaning if you have a chat group, if you have a community, if you have your own information, bring that information out. Customers have questions about cars.
about loans, about how to finance it, about events, all of this. And you informed them so far through emails, through flyers. That information you start now bringing out and you have to build this up in an SEO setup because that information needs to be trustworthy. Trustworthy is still a topic, right?
And SEO is all about like, what’s the halo effect? How important is the site? Do I trust the site? So that game you still have to play and you bring it out.
Then the tools will pick it up and start coming back to you and saying, okay, that’s interesting information, which I have not seen or which is special, which is for this area. So people are talking about Sanjeev’s dealership and they’re saying, I have a question about a car and the most information I get actually from Sanjeev. So the tool will, in order to… The user will say, actually, you know what?
All this information comes from Sanjeev. The tool is actually proud that it understood that the information comes from Sanjeev. So if you think about… Let me, sorry, let me ask you a question on that one about making your information public, but that information that you’re making public should be powerful information.
And so my question to you… It should be novel, like ideally novel. It should be unique. Really unique.
And it should be authentic. So don’t write 10,000 times, Sanjeev is the coolest kid in town, but put this into an authentic barrier. There is one very, very important one, because I see this going wrong a lot if people put out information. Do not ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or other tools to create content for you.
That will not… Work. And this is very important. You have a team that wrote your newsletter that you move outside.
Do not go to OpenAI and say, write me a few statements about me and put this out, because it will not improve the model quality. And we can go… There are technical reasons for why Slop does not include… I’ll just somewhat quality because the model doesn’t learn from content it just created, right?
This is the snake eating its own tail. So all of the model provider are extremely careful to trying to figure out slop. If you create slop, you will lose out. So don’t do this.
Use your human to bring it in. So there’s some content that you can create, which has to be authentic. It has to be powerful. It has to be unique.
And it is something that is not created by one of the AI tools. I got that. There’s also interactions that customers are having with you. That is not content you are creating, it’s content they are creating.
Because they may say, this is what I want to do, but it’s on your site. It’s not outside of your dealership. Is that another category that you it would be good to make it public? And what about privacy laws and things like that?
Totally. So if a customer comes to you and says, who I have the following problem, what should I do? I’m here with like with this issue, and you help that customer. Then the model says, Oh, wow, I that’s a human story.
That’s authentic. It’s novel, because I’ve never seen this kind of issue. And Sanjeev helped them. So now I will learn this, that this is approach.
So your own data, especially the interaction with a customer are valuable. Now you ask, what’s about privacy? Well, you have to tell your customers that you’re using it, right? Now you could try to anonymize data.
It’s a very tricky thing to do. So I always would anonymize and ask, just to be on the safe side. There is another important part for you, once you use your data is how you package it up. So the best way you packages up package up your content is actually in a Q&A format.
Because the tool is doing auto completion. If somebody asks, how many wheels have a car? Does a car have? It’s a stupid example.
But it’s like just to be very clear. If some human asks, how many wheels does a car have? And the model has two possible areas. One is is read the sentence, the car has four wheels, and then think about it, I should answer four.
That’s a cognitive load for model, costs money. Or it has exactly the question, how many wheels does a car have? And it says four, it’s not a cognitive load for the model, just picks up and says four, right? So the model will tend to go to what is the least cognitive load, very much like humans.
Meaning for the dealer, having this information, try to use your customer information, try to what you have, the more it’s your own data, the better it is, do not use slop, or like AI generated data, and package it up in Q&A, because that is what the model will use most. Q&A format, human generated, ideally based on your own data. So you can use AI to generate data and then send it to your customer. Yeah, that is very, very interesting.
By the way, you can use AI tools to help you. For example, you take your newsletter, which you send out, like easy thing, you have sent out newsletter since the last 10 years, okay? Take those newsletters, ask an AI tool to generate out of this newsletter, Q&As, and put this on your website. Very straightforward, very feasible to do.
And boom, you have your first, So that’s the fourth step. So that’s the fifth step. Authentic, novel content on your website, and hopefully it’s getting picked up. The content is not created by the AI tool, it’s just helping you organize your authentic content.
Exactly. Got it. That’s wonderful. Do not create it otherwise, it will harm you.
Now, second bucket is there is authentic content, right? Yeah. Authentic content about you out there in the world, right? You did not have control about what people said at the local hangout about your brand.
You loved it when people talked about you, but you did not have control. And in the internet, we didn’t have control neither, right? So we have Kelly Blue Book, we have Google’s ranking sites, right? We have different advisory sites, right?
Advisory sites, all around how good are we, we have Reddit, we have LinkedIn, we have many social networks, where people will talk, we have TikTok, all of those are things where people talk about your brand, and that is mostly authentic, right? Reddit, as a typical site, they are so authentic, that their data for the models are extremely valuable, and everybody realized it and sends now AI bots to it. So Reddit actually at one point in time says, you know what, we will probably do a video check before somebody is allowed to post. So like you write something, you want to have post, your camera goes on and say, wave at me, show me that you’re a real human, right?
So because it’s so valuable what these guys do, meaning there is interaction you consumers have foster them. There is, it sounds like an SEO discussion because there was already an important one for SEO, but for GEO, this becomes even more important. Now the important part is the models are focused on novel information, right? If you wrote your newsletter about the new arrival of AI bots, the van, whatever type it is, and that’s about a month ago.
The model knows many people wrote about the van. It’s a month old. If you have a video from somebody who is sitting in that van and it’s from yesterday, the model will tend to saying, let me rather use novel information because most people do not like stale information. Okay.
So let me just press you on one particular point. I think you’ve answered the question, but I just want to be clear about this. So on the third party sites, it’s not your own website as a dealership. I’m a dealership.
I’ve got my own website. Now these are third party sites, maybe Reddit, maybe others. And then somehow the search engines are the, you know, whether it’s Claude or, any of these other things, open AI, the way it searches, it will look for recency. It looked for novelty, authentic, but it’ll also look for sites that it considers to be powerful and authentic.
Okay. And the content in those sites though, I’m just trying to be clear. If a customer, if Lutz write something about Sanjeev’s dealership, or if Sanjeev write something about Sanjeev’s dealership, they’re both equivalent or is Lutz writing about Sanjeev’s dealership more powerful than myself writing about my own dealership? The answer will surprise you.
Lutz is more powerful, but not because Lutz is inherently more powerful. It is because you, Sanjeev, and you write about your own dealership, you are limited by your own imagination. You will write about what you think your dealership should do and why you’re good. And you sit down and you write this up and you’re done after a day, because that’s how you run your business.
And I come in and I say, by the way, I really liked the tulips. This is such a nice area. And you’re like, wait, what’s tulips? What the heck are you talking?
Oh, the tulips out there. Oh, okay. Yeah. I, never paid attention.
It’s like, yeah, but they drew me in. This is Lutz as a, like as an, it is an outside entity and it will give you a different spin. That’s makes it authentic. That makes it novel.
Nobody ever talked about my tulips here. Right? So that is why Lutz is more powerful. Okay.
Got it. So this is a, the second and a really powerful bucket. Let’s talk about the third one. So the third one is about the structure for overall content.
You as a dealer, you have ever changing prices and cars and inventory bucket one and bucket two spoke about reputation spoke about making you visible. Bucket three is, is about the up to date information you have at the moment. Where do I get the pricing information? I said it as I came to the U S I scraped all the dealerships.
I could have as well went to Cali blue book, right? To see it, whatever the dealer placed there. Right. Um, if you are a model, you want to know where is the best information because a customer will ask something.
Where do I, where do I get the Ford with air con seed heating for lower than, um, I don’t know, $25,000. The customer might ask this, then the model will need not to figure out the customer. Didn’t say I want the coolest friendliest guy, which obviously will be Sanjeev. No, but the model, like the customer asked a very specific question in order to get to a negotiation point.
That means, the computer will now check who offers the car. And that means Sanjeev’s website needs to be able to talk back to the model and has to be able to do this every day. And that is a technical shift for the website. The, there, there’s an underlying protocol for agent to agent communication.
It’s called MCP. So what the website should be able to do, is saying, Hey, I’m the website from Sanjeev. Dear OpenAI, dear Anthropic, ask me any question. I’m happy to answer to you because now the website comes like Anthropic gets asked a question and Anthropic goes around and says, I’m, I’m here to search for a cheap car.
The website should answer. This is the car I have currently at that price. Anthropic says, cool. Now, no, I know it.
I go, I go back to my user and tell him that Sanjeev has a car. So we have two reputational buckets. And the third one is a structural bucket. How do you communicate?
That is not taking a newsletter and pull it out. That is take your current pricing and current inventory and make sure a model knows up to date because for the model, it would be very annoying when the model says, go to Sanjeev. You want a Ford, go to Sanjeev. And then you go to Sanjeev and Sanjeev said, yeah, well, currently I don’t have any.
Then people make the trip and said, I’m not going to ask Anthropic again. Clock is not good. Yeah. This has been just an amazing conversation because it is such a pertinent conversation going from SEO to geo.
There are more people searching with geo right now. So if I had to summarize the three insights, it would be, there’s a, for me, there’s an, internal, what do you do in the dealership? External, what do you do in places outside of the dealership? And the third one for me is giving some context to what it means to be authentic.
So when you think about within the dealership, it breaks up into two pieces. There’s a reputational piece, and then there is a simply the way in which your website is constructed, to give, to give information. And the, the insight for the, for a dealership, for your internal pieces, SEO is incredibly important. It’ll continue to be incredibly important.
You have to be good at it. However, there’s a lot that goes on in your dealership that is not readable. It is not, uh, public and it cannot be picked up by some of these AI tools. You need to make that public.
And there are ways to do it. The important thing that you need to understand is the nature of what is put together. You cannot have AI tools generating the content. It should be authentic content that is generated within the dealership.
It could be communication with customers. It could be description of the cars. It could be description of the dealership, but it has to be authentic. Also, your website has to be, uh, made in such a way.
It’s a technical thing, but it should, it should be made so that it will talk to the AI agents all the time. If they’re looking for a car, looking for a price, looking for facts, it should be able to communicate it directly, uh, to the G E O agents. So that’s the first bucket. It’s a change from what we did previously.
The second is external. There are external sites, and some are more reputable than others. The AI agents will go to the most reputable sites and it will look for content. Now the content can come from the dealership itself.
The content can come from customers. The combination is important. The more customers talk about you, the more it is going to show up. If the dealership puts content, it again should be really authentic, unique, et cetera, so that the, the, um, the AI tools are picking it up and it’ll show it when a customer is searching, uh, for your, for your vehicles and for your dealership.
The third bucket that it, it is applicable to the first two, but I’ve broken it out to be the third is to be really clear that the content has to be three things. It has to be unique. It has to be novel. It has to be authentic.
If every, every dealership simply says, I look after customers. It’s not unique. Every single dealership is saying the same thing. I love some of the things that Lutz, you were talking about, which is dealers have to use their imagination.
You’ve got to try to become unique. Think about unique material that is true to your dealership, that other dealerships are not just going to mimic those words. Uh, you know, in the example that we used here, you said, complete, complete the sentence. Life is like a box off.
If everyone says chocolates, the answer is going to be chocolates. If every dealership says, I am the best at customer service, it’s not going to differentiate them. You have to use your imagination to bring those things to life in the first two buckets. So those are my three insights from this conversation.
Lutz, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you. I know the dealerships will have gotten a lot out of this, but for now, thank you for your time. You’re amazing. What an amazing background.
Thanks to everybody out there. Good luck on that journey. Thank you. The dealers who win turn insights into action.
Now’s the time to take the lead. This has been three key insights with Sanjeev Yajnik. We’ll see you next time. Views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Capital One Auto, Capital One NA, or its affiliates.
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