How Cars Commerce Uses AI To Accelerate Marketing
AI search is already moving the funnel. In a recent study, 93% of marketers are creating content optimized for generative AI, and 58% say at least half their content meets that bar.
AI search platforms now drive 34% of qualified leads-second only to social (46%) and ahead of traditional search (30%), email (29%), and paid media (25%). Two-thirds still use Google in distribution, but more than half are building distinct strategies for AI platforms. And 35% now define "content success" as better performance in generative AI search-beating brand awareness (34%) and SEO (29%).
What this means for CMOs
- Shift from pure SEO to AEO (answer engine optimization): structure content to answer specific questions in natural language. A good primer: What is AEO?
- Upgrade metadata, tagging, and featured snippet readiness across your library.
- Use expert bylines and depth to earn trust in AI summaries.
- Track AI-search visibility and conversions as first-class metrics, not just rankings.
Inside Cars Commerce: A practical model for AI at scale
Cars Commerce spans a consumer marketplace (Cars.com) and dealer-focused platforms for websites, marketing, appraisals, and wholesale. That scope forces discipline: pick a task, apply tech, test fast, and scale only if quality holds.
Make AI a task-first toolkit
The team prioritizes "smarter, faster, cheaper" without sacrificing "smarter." High-yield wins include photo editing, color correction, and copywriting-removing repetitive work so creatives and strategists can focus on quality.
The rule: define the task, pick the tool, pilot quickly, measure impact, then standardize. Speed is an outcome, not the goal.
Close the gaps between marketing, product, and sales
AI helps keep messages consistent from brand to product marketing to sales enablement to sales. Tighter handoffs mean buyers hear one story across channels and assets.
Turn VIN-level assets into video
With millions of VINs, Cars Commerce can repurpose dealer and private-seller photos in many ways. What's new: testing AI workflows to generate videos for specific used cars-something that wasn't scalable before.
Content strategy: from SEO to AEO
As both publisher and marketplace, decades of editorial become an advantage. Content is shifting from SEO-only formats to deeper, mid-funnel question answering with clear structure.
Early signal: SEO traffic is smaller but converts better-buyers arrive lower in the funnel, improving marketplace value even as top-of-funnel volume softens.
Talent: hire generalists who connect the dots
Channel specialization helped for years, but AI is flattening many tasks. The scarce skill now is the strategic generalist-people who understand the business, translate goals across channels, and apply critical thinking.
Entry-level roles that are overly narrow are at risk. Training should push breadth early, then depth where it drives outcomes.
A playbook you can run this quarter
- Audit tasks by volume and impact. Automate production work (images, variants, formatting, transcriptions) first.
- Set a "quality bar" for AI output. Require human review on brand voice, claims, and compliance.
- Build a cross-functional content pipeline. One brief β derivatives for product, enablement, sales, ads, and customer education.
- Refactor 25 key pages for AEO: clear questions, scannable subheads, concise answers, expert attribution, structured data.
- Instrument AI-search performance: track inclusion in AI answers, referral traffic, save rate, assisted conversions.
- Stand up a "VIN-to-video" experiment if you sell catalog items. Test CTR, time-on-page, and lead quality.
- Upskill your team on promptcraft, QA, and AEO. For structured training, see: AI courses by job and AI certification for Marketing Specialists.
Market moves to watch (and what to do)
- Walmart x ChatGPT: Shopping inside a chat interface pressures product discovery and attribution. Plan SKUs, bundles, and metadata for conversational queries, and revisit affiliate/retail media reporting.
- Instagram teen policies: Stricter defaults reduce exposure to suggestive or risky content for under-18 users. Review targeting, creative ladders, and language filters for youth segments.
- YouTube policy shifts: Reinstatement paths and evolving moderation raise brand-safety questions. Update exclusions, inventory filters, and whitelists; monitor creator status, not just video topics.
- Chatbots and age gating: Mature-content plans and ongoing safety scrutiny mean clearer age signals and content controls. Align brand suitability guidelines with your AI channel strategy.
People moves
- Cate Lochead named CMO at Bentley Systems.
- Andrew Hartshorn appointed Chief Brand & Innovation Officer at Welch's.
- Melanie Babcock joins 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as Chief Marketing & Growth Officer.
Quick prompts for your team
Fix your funnel
- "Analyze our last 90 days of paid + organic conversions. Identify 5 messaging patterns in top-converting paths and propose 3 new creative angles to test per pattern."
- "Given these 10 FAQs and our product features, draft concise AEO-ready answers (max 60 words each) with suggested schema markup and internal links."
- "Turn this hero case study into a 7-asset pack: 2 ad variants, 1 product one-pager, 1 sales email, 1 landing page intro, 1 social carousel outline, 1 30-second script."
- "Score our top 50 pages for snippet readiness (direct answers, headings, schema, freshness). Prioritize the top 10 fixes with expected impact."
- "Create a 4-week test plan: hypotheses, audiences, channels, KPIs, and decision rules for scaling or killing each experiment."
Improve team cohesion
- Institute a weekly "single brief" ritual so product, content, media, and sales enablement ship from the same source of truth.
- Adopt a shared QA checklist for AI-assisted work (claims, citations, voice, compliance).
- Run a 30-minute retro after each campaign: what worked, what failed, what to standardize. Document and templatize the winners.
Quiz
Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl" broke Billboard's record for the biggest album debut, with more than 4 million albums streamed and sold in its first week. Which artist previously held this record?
- A. Lady Gaga
- B. Michael Jackson
- C. Adele
- D. BeyoncΓ©
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