Most inefficient way for you to actually find what you're looking for on the internet, but you got to play the game that's being played. Right. You got to put the right uniform on. So the reality is, forty-five percent of people are going to ChatGPT now. In most cases, free version, and are searching for the criteria of whatever it is they're looking for. And we'll use the dealership. I'm looking for a car. Now this can work really well because we know that the Google doesn't ask you questions back. You do a traditional search, but ChatGPT does. So it asks you questions like to inspect more about what you're looking for. And Google calls this an emerging convention, okay? Which is a step before a standard, okay? But there's a convention out there known as LLMs, and that's short for large language model with the plural LLMs. Websites are not built.

Or LLMs, or most, or not, right now, because it has to live at the base, what we call the root of your website. It needs to be yourwebsite.com forward slash LLMs.txt. That's what AI is looking for when it does a search, and this is a huge opportunity for dealers because they get to now control the message or what those. Bots are either crawling and storing in memory, or in real time. If someone's doing a search using ChatGPT for a specific vehicle, or that doesn't mention the AI drills down into what they're actually looking for and says, "Ah, I found one." Okay, that is what we call the back cover. And I just use the analogy: you're an author, being your book.

So the back cover of your book, most back covers of the book either have about the author, or in a lot of cases have what this book is all about. And so we've, through the years, we go to the bookstore, we pull it up, we look at the front cover, that looks interesting. We flip to the back and we read about what's in the contents of this book. That's what AI is looking for, and it's looking for it in a way that we as humans wouldn't really want to read. It's in markdown language. It looks like code. It's not really code because you can read it in English.

It's like plain text. It almost looks like plain text for for those that are wondering. Markdown, yeah,

Yeah. It's it's it's black text on a white screen. Yeah, and I can share I can share some examples with you. But in the the AI's world, that's what it's looking for because on the front cover of the book, we've over the years we've graduated to videos and pictures and and all kinds of, JavaScript things that load on the front page that look really good to human eyeballs, and that's what we've been driving to behavior is trying to get them on our website so that we can provide enough information them for them to make their next decision or move them along in the buying cycle. LLMs don't read the front page, at all. They look at it if there's if there's some.

Texts to be captured, they might, but in Google's own language, and I'm using Google as the gold standard here for how this works. In their own language, they say that the AI basically won't spend much time digging on the front cover of your book for information. It hand waves, as we like to call an AI, and moves on. But if it sees a page that's written for it, yeah, it grabs all that information.

Mm hmm. Can we pause for a mind blower moment right now with what you're saying? Sure. I I need to emphasize what you're saying for those that are listening, because a lot of the soup that's being sold is more content, and I think that does have a place. However, if it's not married to the structure of what you're saying.

Then it gets the handwave, and I think that's important in the context of the auto industry because a lot of people are going to talk about the first half, and they're not going to be talking about exactly what you. This is where we say, Wade, you're dropping power bombs, because if people don't know that, then it opens it makes us susceptible to false information or half accurate information, and what I'm hearing you about say. We've had a lot of conversations about this internally with my team. Like bad data in is bad data out, or a lot of data in without the right structure means no data out, essentially. And I'm thinking about the implication of it. Like one of our, you know, our tech company that's an infrastructure layer for inventory data, to to normalize and standardize the data and make sure it's all accurate and enriched, is only good if it feeds into the infrastructure layer that you're talking about.

Else, it's like who cares? You're you're basically leaving it to the agent to search for it on its own, and none the better.

Right. So, we emphasize that the front cover of the book and the back cover of the book need to match one another because the information in, and specifically in a car dealership scenario, you have a very dynamic component of your website. is called your inventory, and you have to have a representation for AI to read the live inventory. On a daily basis, it changes every day. And in order to do that, we have to take in order to it would be a very heavy manual lift. In order to do a scrub of 300 plus inventory between new and used, right? And differentiate differentiate what changed overnight, and put that new information out there. This is where AI handles structuring data very very well.

Yeah. So the back cover is simply a mirror image in the legible language that AI wants to read, and that it can follow instructions to the referenced URLs. And potentially, we are not. There's no standard by which we know of ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity delivering back the URL yet. That's sort of part of this emerging convention. Is what will it deliver back? But what I say is, you're not in the game. If AI can't find you, and this is the findable thing, right? So we spent all this time on the SEO component to be findable when a human does a Google search. The same effort needs to be applied to giving the AI what it wants to read, so that it can deliver the accurate information. I think there's just been this underlying assumption, and I probably had it for a while too in the early days of ChatGPT that it was looking at websites the way humans do.

And what we've come to discover is that's not true at all. In fact, most what it will do, if it can't read the website, is it defers itself to some Google search results in the cloud. And what we find every single time, Michael, is that that's six to nine months old, or it's wrong. This is where AI can get off the rails, and what we call hallucinations. Yep. And so it can go wrong because it wants to deliver an answer. So it makes something up to give something back to the person who used ChatGPT to search. This is a real opportunity to what we call author. You get to author what AI reads about you, whether it stores that in memory for later reference or it fetches it in real time when you're doing that search. Either way, you control what AI is saying about your business, where you are, your hours, and your inventory. And we look at it from the car dealership perspective.

Is there's a static component of the LLMS that needs to stay the same because your address isn't going to change every day, but your inventory is the dynamic component. And the gold standard for how to structure this, and we do this for our customers because we followed the standard both in the way that Google says here's how you present the data so that AI can read it, and then the structure we follow ourvana's method. And there's a daughter page that's updated every single day, and that's actually. LLMS dash full. That the first page says, " Hey, here's all my inventory." It's really that simple. And the AI says, " I got a page that I can read because I'm looking for LLMS." And boom, here's a daughter page with more deep data about this dealership. And here's their live inventory.

Wow. Um, you're blowing my mind right now. I think you know. What did they used to say? The nerds make all the money. You know. And here we are again. Like to me, and I'm loving this because I I think I identify as a nerd more than anything. Talking about something so nerdy that has real tangible downstream operational impact for a dealer. Yes, that most are not, and by no fault of theirs. I mean they they're running a business, but most are not going to know. And without conversations like what we're having, Wade, most won't know about.

So then the math supports that. I don't have the direct statistics in front of me, but I can confidently say that eighty five percent of what we've searched for. And and by the way, this a simple acid test. This something in your most. In one of your recent episodes, you talked about Google Business Profile and something you can action on today. I want to take that actionable item to this right now. Anyone can go to the root, their main page. If you're not familiar with the term root, it's where your website lives.

Michael, in your case, thedealerplaybook. com, and after that, in the menu bar, type forward slash l l m s dot t x t.

Eighty some percent. Again, I'm pulling the numbers. I don't have directly in front of me, but we know it's the large majority is going to throw what the internet calls a 404 error. In other words, page not found. Yep. In some cases, because the SEO plugins that they're, Using on the front cover, have populated a page. There might be some info there, but it's most likely an advertisement for the SEO plugin. It doesn't contain the actual information that a user is looking for, and in a lot of cases, it's still not crawlable by the robots. So it throws them a 403, and we do this from our AI all the time. I say go look at this website and tell me the status of the page as it relates to LOMS.

And we'll go. It'll say we got a four hundred three. It's not crawlable. It might be visual to human eyes. Again, that plug-in that someone checked the box and said, "Here you go," but it really isn't doing the role that it's designed to do. The good news in that regard, Michael, is that means the website hosting company itself is built to support LLMs. Some are holding that back. Man, don't want to take us too far off. How come? Why? Why would they hold it back? Well, because they don't, they they call it supportable, right? And so it's a new, it's an it's an emerging convention, as Google calls it, and they're not really sure what it is. So they're like not letting you put a daughter page on the on the rest of your website just that they don't control or they don't have a template for. A lot of these websites, you know, are built with a template: drag a picture in here, drag a text box in here. So it's a format of a page that they're unfamiliar with.

Good friend of mine's a photographer, and photographers tend to host one of the three main platforms. And he's one of those main platforms. They will not support the LLMs page, not because they can't; they just don't know what it is yet. And so, again, it's emerging, but this coming so fast. And and so happy that you had me on because this what the dealers need to hear. This your chance to own the authored page of what AI reads about you. And for the time being, there's not ad dollars associated with it. And we all know those the Google ads, the Meta ads, all of all of the the motion that we've been created. This is your chance to author what AI reads.

About you. Now, my question being, from an infrastructure perspective, a dealer is listening to this and they're saying, " Okay, this all makes sense," and I like this idea of authoring or controlling the authorship of what's said about me. But I'm in an OEM program, and I have to use this website provider and that, or this one, or this one, and they all have kind of this limitation. What do we do about that? What is the question I should be asking, or what is the first step that I should be taking? I have great news for you here.

Dealer. com, Dealer On, and Dealer Inspire are the three big daddies that I'm aware of. And I'm not in the car business, but I've I've learned a lot about the car business in doing this. Those are the three major platforms, and they all do support an LOMS page. Meaning, you as a user can populate that page at will, and that's what we do for our customers. Is we take that user access on a daily basis, scrub the inventory, and repopulate the page, and so their their inventory. And we give them a dashboard that they can see the number of vehicles that came onto the lot and off the lot every single day.

With a running tally of of what's going what's going on their page, so it's something that you can search. And in most cases, if if you're covered by one of those three, if you're on Wix or other platforms, most of them are supporting it, or they're very quickly coming around to we have to support this type of page, even though we may not understand it or people how how people are going to use it, but we're going to support it in the norts.

Okay, you need to talk me off a ledge right now. Controversial opinion of the day. I'm allowed one. I'm going to use it on this. I think it seems like I love the way you spelled this out. Front page of a book, back page of a book. They need to be in alignment. Do you think there's a world in the next five years where? The concept of websites as they exist today, which is speed and user experience and quick navigation and all these sorts of things, actually moves into a much more agentic repository of information. Like you talk about a six percent to a forty-five percent swing in user adoption on GPT. What was the time frame? A year? Twelve months? Twelve months. To that's a huge uptick in user adoption. Like, are.

Are we moving into a world where the way we've been thinking about websites is going to be obsolete, and we need to be thinking about them as repositories of clean content and inventory data.

I'm not even going to just express my own opinion because the short answer is yes. But we're already seeing the evidence of that. Cloudflare last month said that we we crossed over the 50 threshold to where more internet on the more traffic on the internet. Is machine to machine than it is human. It's in the low fifty - one, fifty - two percent range. Is now agentic AI across the internet and.

Less humans. You know why this makes me laugh? Because eight years ago, five years ago, three and twelve months ago, we're like, what's with all this bot traffic on my site? I'm seeing all these bots in my analytics, and it's like, okay, crap. Create a filter that filters out the bot traffic, so we actually know. And what I'm hearing you say, and what I've been feeling, is like, yo, go limp, embrace the, em embrace the robots. You're gonna be seeing a lot more robots doing the car shopping activity, and I think it's predicated on this one thought process for me. And I'm still working through the words here to how to articulate it, but I'd be curious your thoughts, which is.

We have this like once every thirty-year cycle. Thirty-five years ago, before websites really hit, you had to shop for a car by opening the newspaper or buying the magazine. You had to call all of the stores. You had to go and visit them. You had to test drive all the things, and then the websites came out, and they were like, "Hey, good news! You don't have to do that anymore. You can shop from the comfort of your couch." Now here we are, and we're saying, "Hey." Hey, you don't have to do that anymore. You can tell your agent, which knows everything about you and understands more context, and will ask you follow-up questions. And like you said earlier, and it will go and do all the shopping for you and present back to you the most viable things that match your lifestyle. In other words, AI has put us into a place that.

You know we're worried about it replacing our jobs. Well, like there are aspects of jobs or tasks that it does replace. Just like the websites replaced this need to go to fifteen different dealerships on a Saturday. Websites did legitimately replace the thing we should have never had to do to begin with. And now AI is replacing this idea of ah now I gotta spend my whole morning going to seven different dealership websites, searching their inventory. Doing a chat, calling them. No, it. We should have AI. Simply, the thesis for me is: Well, you should have never had to do that either. Now I can do it for you, right? Thoughts, feelings.

What do you think? Yeah, no, absolutely right. And I think career in sales, technology sales. I I like to equate it to the the continuum that is a buying cycle. Yeah. What you just articulated is the early part of the the buying cycle. That's really, Full of friction for the user, and as our AIs, we're going to have them with the the newest iPhone and the newest iWatch, or who knows what OpenAI is going to introduce as our next device that we carry. It's fair to assume that we're all going to have an AI that's personal, knows me, like knows me. So for it to go off and do this, the discovery component, and get me further along in the decision cycle, or then maybe point me to videos on the dealers.

YouTube channel that then brings it says yes that's one of my top two and I will spend my Saturday afternoon a couple hours driving to those two dealerships because I've gotten through the decision cycle and frictionless by having my AI agent do the work for me. Yeah, that you that what previously was the eyeballs and the clicking effort of the human.

This brings me to I kind of where where I think I want to shape out the conversation as we wind down, which is. My plea for people to get fully immersed in this whole AI thing, so that you are in a position to understand where the value of the human actually will increase, and where the value of the robot is. And it's funny, Wade. Yesterday we're having poor guy. We're having lunch at a steakhouse, Longhorn Steakhouse. Okay, nobody think I'm all posh and I'm going to some.

Some you know eighty dollar hundred dollar steakhouse no Longhorn lunch special. This server hears us. We're talking about marketing, and this server comes to our table and he's like, "I couldn't help but over here. I was actually going to go into marketing, but I heard all of the stuff you guys are talking about AI, and it made me want to go and become a. I'm I'm in the nursing program now, and I'm like, hey, that's awesome, good for you. To the point of increasing human value. I said, "Hey, can I can I share something with you?" He said, "Sure." I said, "Focus on things in your practice that the only the human can do. AI's not going to hold my hand when I need my hand held. The value of that exchange actually goes up." Claude has never complimented me, Wade, and I've gone, "Aw." Mhm. You know, like there are, but it's from the full immersion that I gain that clarity.

And you know what's so funny about this, and so heartbreaking at the same time. Right after that, he asked if I wanted my soda refilled, and I said yes, and he forgot to do it. Humans make errors. Hey, I don't make errors. Well, it didn't land, and I think why I'm so passionate about this idea of full immersion to understand the line and and what interactions will enhance. True technology and what scale can come from it, and so on and so forth, is because I'm just kind of worried most people are going to miss the point.

Hey, hey, I say 26. It comes to around 26 because some of those have like slightly less than 2. 5, and some have a little over 2.

Yeah, it's like like some of them because I kind of counted like it's on there. So like it'll say two point five five, so we have that, and then one will say like two point six. Yeah, so the one I kind of put in an extra pound because that's about what that little bit of overage in each pack comes to. I took ten packs of each. So I left you some because it was like, I was like, I'm gonna leave him some, and also it just has it where I'm not as jammed up in my freezer. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We doing it like this? Yeah, because you know.

And I'll end up using most of the case, but it leaves you some. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was just I'm bad about invoicing. Like, eventually, it's it's definitely one of the first positions I have to hire when I start hiring people. It's like an accountant person that does all this. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, we have we have like photographs of our white. Well, we have photographs of our. Window that we use as a whiteboard, and so I go, okay, well, shit. When was the last time I invoiced him? And I'm like, oh fuck, the last time I invoiced him was the ninth. That's like, oh god. Well, it's a pain in the ass. Well, yeah, and and I, I did all of your. So one of your invoices is only a hundred bucks, because yeah, you saw that because I I put all the meat on one, and I'm adding twenty.

I took the thing you sent me, the PDF you sent me. Um, yeah, and I just added, I took that and added twenty cents to each pound for shipping. Yeah, for like shipping inconvenience or whatever, you know what I'm saying? I'm like, yeah, and it helps. It helps, you know, instead of it just being a flat cost. Yeah, I'm helping cover some of your shipping and stuff.

Yeah, I think it was what six ninety nine or something. Yeah, but I was for real. Like you don't have to pay them all at once. That's my bad for like waiting so long because you've got one, two, three, four, five of them, I think. But I just took. That's what I'm saying. It just took me so long to get them in there. So you can legit space them out. Yeah.

You know, you need to find it. If if he won't help you out with it, find a more crooked accountant. I mean, a more creative accountant. Yeah. Christy was in her training, and she was talking to that guy Hunter that does the like did the business training for her personal training crap this past weekend, and he was talking about the importance of a creative accountant. He's like. He said, "Man, the laws are written to where you really don't have to pay much taxes at all if you run everything through your business." He said, "But not every accountant is good at or willing to help you do that. So make sure you get one that's plenty creative and knows how to figure all that little shit out." Yep. So yeah, yeah. If you've got somebody wired into it, that's all it takes.

Sweet like bear meat. All right, dude. Well, I'll be hollering at you. All right, man.

No problem. Yeah. And what interactions will enhance through technology, and what scale can come from it, and so on and so forth, is because I'm just kind of worried most people are gonna miss the point.

Yeah. So I've written about this in a couple of my essays, and I'm I'm passionate about helping people get through what I call the blast door. Which the blast door is thinking back to the Millennium Falcon. Those things closed really fast, in a split second, the door was closed. And I'm helping I'm helping as many people as I can upskill because the judgment layer is still human, and the instruction layer, meaning telling AI what to go do. And judging its outputs and then its next actions, is the human layer that you're talking about that is truly an uplift. It is it is something that we're enhancing our human capabilities, instead of getting caught in the minutia of changing the spreadsheet or, as your case, shopping for the car. Yeah, who have something else do that and then layer your judgment and your further instructions on top of it. That's where I come at it from, and I truly believe that there's a lot of opportunity for people.

To do just that, lift yourself up. Understand it to the degree that you need to, but don't get caught too much in the weeds of how this thing works. It just does if it's used properly. I always go back to that. So yeah, I think the opportunity is almost unfair. But I, I want to leave you with this, for your dealer listeners, is it's almost unfair that over twenty some years we've been trained to, as I said earlier, chase this Google algorithm, and now the game's changed. The good news is, it's not going to be as long to adapt to it, and it's not near the expense to adapt to it to get the the AI component of the search addressed the same way that you've spent all these years getting your front cover of the book discoverable as well.

I love it. What a fun conversation. My neighbor, everybody. How about this? My neighbor Wade. How can those listening or watching connect with you?

Well, my name's one of those funny spellings. Kerzie, K - E - R - Z - I - E. Dot A - I. That's me. You can find. You can connect with me there. My calendar's there. My emails there. Kerzie. Dot A - I.

Thank you. That's awesome. Thanks so much for joining me on the Dealer Playbook podcast. Yep. Thank you.