“A Band-Aid on a Bullet Hole” - Why AI SEO Pitches Keep Failing Dealers | Brooke C Furniss, founder of BZ Consultants Group
The vendor hype machine has dealers buying AI SEO, GEO and AI visibility on faith. Brooke Furniss shows you what to verify before you write the next check.
Every few months there’s another marketing acronym dealers are told they need to understand. And with each new term comes another vendor promising to get your store ahead.
Brooke Furniss, founder of BZ Consultants Group and host of Facts Not Feelings, joins Michael Cirillo to break down what she’s seeing firsthand on calls with dealers and vendors.
She’s watched dealerships get pitched overnight rankings, 50 AI-generated pages a day, and AI visibility tools that can’t tell a shopper in Chicago from one in Naperville. Her concern is that too many stores are signing before anyone checks what these products actually deliver. And if your SEO was weak before AI showed up, a new tool on top is a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.
Here’s what you’ll take away:
The red flags in an AI SEO pitch, from guaranteed overnight rankings to content volume that invites a Google penalty
The questions that expose a white-labeled AI visibility tool, starting with whether it can read local intent
A schema check you can run yourself on any page your provider says they’ve optimized
The Google Search Console click-through benchmark Brooke uses in automotive, and what a low number says about your agency
Why more AI content does little for your rankings while your Google Business Profile, reviews and listings still need work
Michael and Brooke also get into why experienced operators fall for the fear-of-missing-out trap, and what happens when the pressure to move faster starts deciding where the dealership’s money goes.
Subscribe to The Dealer Playbook for more conversations with operators doing interesting things in retail automotive.
Takeaway: Before the next AI contract gets signed, make them show you the schema, the Search Console data, and exactly where their numbers come from. Facts, not feelings.
Timestamps
(00:00) Why Hype Matters
(00:43) Show Support and Free Book
(03:05) Snake Oil in AEO GEO
(04:47) AI Visibility Tool Myths
(08:40) AI Content Versus Slop
(12:54) Fast Cheap Versus Right
(16:17) One Meeting Hype Test
(21:20) Why Wallets Open for Hype
(22:49) Buzzwords and Echo Chambers
(24:33) Connect and Closing
Episode Brought To You By FlexDealer
Need Better Quality Leads? FLX helps car dealers generate better quality leads through localized organic search and highly-targeted digital ads that convert. Not only that, they work tirelessly to ensure car dealers integrate marketing and operations for a robust and functional growth strategy.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00] Michael Cirillo: I want to know from your vantage point, because you're sitting on tons of dealer calls and vendor calls in your consulting firm, what's leading you to this topic? Why do you want to talk about hype?
[00:09] Brooke C. Furniss: I have spoken on this a lot, and there is so much noise around this. I've got multiple clients and non-clients that are falling into this trap of, "Well, it's the new hot thing, so therefore we should buy it." But whoa, let's roll that back and understand what you're getting. Are you actually getting what's being pitched to you right now?
[00:25] Michael Cirillo: So my question: how do we reconcile the challenge of "I want to go faster and I want to be cheaper," like any operator, against "No, it's got to be done right"? Because the market is saying fast and cheap, maybe we're adopting fast and cheap as our operating model.
[00:42] Brooke C. Furniss: That's a great question.
A Word from FlexDealer
[00:45] Michael Cirillo: One of the things I enjoy most about producing The Dealer Playbook is hearing from you: the messages I get from people who are getting so much value out of the podcast, applying it to their day-to-day workflows, and finding a thriving career right here in the retail auto industry. It means the world to me.
One of the ways we make doing this possible is through my agency, FlexDealer. And in the spirit of providing value, I think this is a perfect time to head over to www.flexdealer.com. To show even further support for you, my beloved DPB gang, right now if you go to flexdealer.com, you can get a full free PDF of my number one best-selling book, Don't Wait, Dominate.
The reason I think it's so special is that a lot of the topics discussed in this book are even more relevant today with this surge in popularized AI, and people wondering, "What can I do next? How can I have a competitive advantage?" That's all here in this book. I'd love to offer you a free copy if you go to flexdealer.com. It would mean the world to me, because that's how we continue to produce this show for you.
Why Hype, Why Now
[02:07] Michael Cirillo: Can you believe it's been four years already since you were last on the show?
[02:12] Brooke C. Furniss: Has it really been four years?
[02:14] Michael Cirillo: Four years. And I remember, because you spoke so eloquently about leadership: the ins and outs of leadership, what leaders need to be thinking about, what they're missing, where they need to go, the zig and the zag.
Today, it's all about hype. I want to know from your vantage point, because you're sitting on tons of dealer calls and vendor calls in your consulting firm, what's leading you to this topic? Why do you want to talk about hype?
[02:43] Brooke C. Furniss: That's a great question. I just want to go back here for a second. That first time we met, I remember this. I was asking you to be on my show, you were asking me to be on your show, and I was like, "I'm very confused. Why am I filling this out for him?" Then we sorted it out, and it was all good.
[03:00] Michael Cirillo: We did the Spider-Man meme thing, pointing back at each other. That's so funny.
[03:05] Brooke C. Furniss: Yeah. Arnold reached out, and I was like, "This is a great topic." I have spoken on this a lot, and there is so much noise around it. I've been on more calls than I care to admit, and there have been some Brooke words that have come out at this point.
It's a very valuable talk when we're talking about AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. I'm very excited to get into this today and dispel a lot of rumors and a lot of snake oil that's being sold to dealers right now. I've got multiple clients and non-clients falling into this trap of, "Well, it's the new hot thing, so therefore we should buy it." But whoa, let's roll that back and understand what you're getting. Are you actually getting what's being pitched to you right now?
The Snake Oil Being Sold to Dealers
[03:48] Michael Cirillo: So can we get into the nitty-gritty, Brooke? What's the snake oil? What are you seeing out there? What do we need to be cautious of?
[03:57] Brooke C. Furniss: Okay. For those of you who've been living under a rock for the last 10 months, there's AEO, there's GEO. At the end of the day, it is really good SEO. If your SEO sucked before AI made its big appearance, it was always there. If your SEO sucked before, I'm going to tell you right now, your SEO sucks even more.
Someone slapping a Band-Aid on a bullet hole is not going to fix the fact that no one can find you and you're at less than a 1% click-through rate in Google Search Console. There's no overnight magic pill. And yet so many people are pitching that. I've had numerous people reach out and say, "Hey, we're getting pitched that they can do this overnight." No, they can't. SEO is a marathon.
So number one: if someone is telling you that overnight, or in a very short time period, they can make you rank, I'm going to call BS on it right now.
Number two is going to be, "We have this AI visibility tool." That's what we call a nice drinking game, Michael. The more I hear AI visibility, I say, "Great. Walk me through your AI visibility tool. Number one, do you own that tool?" Nine times out of 10, if they know, they'll say no. They're white labeling another product.
SEMrush, Ahrefs, BrightLocal: they're all very good products. They have their place, and I use them as well. AI visibility isn't necessarily one of them. There are things they can show, for sure. But a lot of companies white labeling these tools have no local intent built in.
Here's what I mean. Let's take Mazda. I want to know the best Mazda dealership near me. A lot of these third-party tools can't read that local intent. They can't tell the difference between someone searching "near me" in Chicago and someone in Naperville. The only way the tool can see it is if the prompt says, "What is the best Mazda dealership near Chicago?" People do not search like that. They don't.
The other issue is that a lot of these tools only look at maybe three of the LLMs out there. That's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Claude, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, all those different things. So if we're weak in this area, great, it's an area of opportunity. But is it just ChatGPT? Is it Grok? Which one is it? Each of those platforms is really different in how you're going to rank. I believe it's Grok that leans more on your organic social media presence. If you're weak there, it doesn't like to serve you up.
Back to regular SEO. Local SEO has always been a big thing: your Google Business Profile, answering reviews, posting photos. If you weren't doing that before, you're being exposed for how bad it is. Thinking someone's going to cut a check and it'll take care of itself? No. You still have to do the basics of answering reviews and asking for reviews. If you have five reviews and they're one star, none of these LLMs, or Google, is going to serve you up.
Then you get down to schema. I've personally been talking about schema since 2010 or 2011, a very long time, and it's making a comeback. The problem is that so many people don't know how to do it correctly. Either they're relying on the agency saying it's done, or the agency pushes it over to the website company and the website company says, "We're not going to do it." Then you're not really doing schema markup.
The next one is, "We're doing FAQs." FAQs are good, but they're a small portion. I believe it was in April or May that Google said it was deprecating rich results for FAQs if FAQs are all you're doing.
If you really want to know, go to schema.org. Click the button that says Validate and put your URL in there. Every page a company tells you, "We put schema on it, we're optimizing," great. Take that URL, put it in there, and see what pops up. My dealers have 50-plus schema markups on the homepage, and their SRPs have another 30 or 40. What you're seeing is a lot of people doing the absolute bare minimum and then saying, "Dude, we're freaking awesome. We do all the schema." No, you don't.
There are so many moving parts between what people are saying and what we can actually independently verify. There's no gold standard for AI visibility. Yes, it's important, but knowing exactly what is being tracked and how it's being tracked is super important. And I just went on a soapbox for like 20 minutes there, Michael, so cut me off.
AI Content and Standing Out
[08:26] Michael Cirillo: No, it's good, because it's clear how deeply you're living in this world. You have somebody on your show and you're like, "I hope they know what they know." And this is clear. You know what you know.
There are a couple of things I want to dissect here, because now there's this idea of what is good content and what isn't. Do we care about AI writing and creating, or do we not? You mentioned there's no gold standard. It seems like we're back in the Wild West, similar to when Web 2.0 first hit the scene and everyone was like, "Oh my gosh, websites, websites, websites." Here we are with AI as it pertains to the work you do. What are your thoughts on all of this? How does one even know what slop is if we're still willing to pay for whatever feels faster?
[09:25] Brooke C. Furniss: I think it was Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land that did an article less than a month ago. We've all been told, if you're copying and pasting straight from an LLM like ChatGPT, don't do that. That's dumb. I know it's the easy thing, but it's really easy to spot.
There were two articles. One was done probably six months ago. They put in search terms, and the top 10 results were identical. Take the car industry: "best whatever dealership." All 10 top result pages were identical, because people are just throwing it in there and thinking, "Well, we did a good job." Well, you're not unique.
Then about a month ago, they came out and said you can use AI, but there's a big difference with slop. We all know it when we see it. Go back to ChatGPT and "delve." If "delve" was in your email, you knew it wasn't written by a human being. And the freaking em dash. I used to use em dashes, and now I don't want to use them anymore.
[10:28] Michael Cirillo: Me too. And I love the em dash.
[10:31] Brooke C. Furniss: I promise. I get some and I go, "This is a human writing this. This isn't ChatGPT." It's gotten better, where you're not seeing 15 fingers on one hand. I get that.
So use AI to come up with ideas, and keep prompting, keep prompting, keep prompting. It shouldn't be that initial prompt, because yours is probably really generic, just like somebody else's, and you'll get the same output. Then you're not unique.
It's the same thing with social media. Don't knock the OEM, to be very clear here. But if your whole social media presence is "I'm going to do whatever the OEM tells me," great. You have the same content as the other 30 dealerships in your market. How does that differentiate you?
Fast and Cheap vs. Done Right
[11:12] Michael Cirillo: I'm thinking about what you're saying here, and there are even layers to it. Let's say Claude is my LLM of choice, just for the type of work I do. And Muse. If you haven't played with Muse... I know you're going to hate me for saying this. I can't believe I gave my life to Meta. But it is pretty cool.
Having said that, I know that with 25 years of lived experience building, testing, trying and failing, I'm approaching LLMs and agents from a different level, and there are levels. If I'm a dealer listening and thinking, "Cool, I'm going to fire my agency, because I can just go to Claude and say, 'Write me a blog about whatever topic,'" bad input equals bad output.
One layer deeper than that is training a Claude skill, and of course there are layers deeper still. A Claude skill that follows an SOP for good content, in this collaborative build process with an AI, is going to get me a better starting position than going to my chat and saying, "Write me this" or "Do this for me."
I worry most people are just going to GPT or Claude or Gemini and saying, "Do this." It's the crappiest prompt. It's so surface level, but it's probably still better than what they could do on their own, and faster. And they're going to gravitate to the speed.
So my question for you, as you work with both sides of the relationship, the dealer as an advocate, accountability partner and consultant, and also having access to so many vendors: how do we reconcile "I want to go faster and I want to be cheaper," like any operator, against "No, it's got to be done right"? Because the market is saying fast and cheap, maybe we're adopting fast and cheap as our operating model.
[13:32] Brooke C. Furniss: A lot to unpack there. The first thing I'll go back to is what you said: it is such the Wild West. If you've been in the business long enough, you know it used to be, "We're just going to change our font to white, put it on a white background, and put as much crap in there as we want."
[13:46] Michael Cirillo: Just keyword stuff as much as you can.
[13:47] Brooke C. Furniss: Stuff the crap out of it like a freaking turkey, man.
A client asked me a very interesting question recently. He said, "I don't agree with this," and I said, "I don't either." They were being told, among other things, "You should start doing 50 AI pages a day." I said, "You guys, no." Google alone has made it clear: don't do this. If there's a way to cheat the system, you are going to get penalized. It's just a matter of time. Google will find out.
The other thing is, I keep three or four templates on hand, and I hate the word template. The reason I do is that I have to send this almost every other day to clients and non-clients who say, "We're going to fire our SEO company because Grok can do it" or "Claude can do it." Well, Claude can do a portion of it. I'm not going to disagree with that. Claude is very intuitive, and Claude or Grok may well take over the world, I'm sure.
But unless you have it connected to all your backend tools, meaning Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, everything, any of these AIs is going to skim it. It doesn't have the knowledge to go back and ask what's actually happening. How does Claude know you have 30 vehicles in transit that you can't actually show? Claude isn't going to know that, and neither is any other AI. You need that person who asks, "What objectives do you have to meet?"
So yes, it comes down to the prompt. But too many people truly believe, "I've never written code in my life, but I spent five minutes on an LLM, so now I can do everything." That's great, but you get what you pay for. You're already seeing some of this get flagged, and it's going to keep getting flagged, just like it did back in the '90s, which dates both of us, when people were keyword stuffing and doing things they thought would game the system.
It'll be very interesting to see what guardrails get put in place. Every month we go through a client's top Google Search Console queries. What you're seeing, and I'm sure you're seeing it too, is a bunch of gobbledygook coming through with something like 70,000 impressions. That's not a human searching. That's a bot.
There are a lot of theories on this. But at the end of the day, I'm not saying you should go fire your SEO agency. That's probably the worst thing you could do right now, because these LLMs, as great as they are, still aren't at the point of doing what we need from an SEO perspective.
The One-Meeting Test
[16:18] Michael Cirillo: This leads to my next question. You've seen your fair share of new acronyms. Dealers are getting bombarded with new acronyms and new hype. AIO, EEO, and Bingo was his name-o. There are all these different acronyms. What would be your one-meeting test to determine whether something is new and they should pay attention, or whether it's hype, slapping a new label on an old donkey, so to speak?
[16:56] Brooke C. Furniss: If it's coming in on the SEO side, it's really easy to check whether they're doing what they say, to an extent. If they say their SEO is great, awesome. There has been a drop-off, obviously, with AI Overviews taking up the entire page.
[17:11] Michael Cirillo: Zero click.
[17:11] Brooke C. Furniss: So even if your SEO is great, it's going to get pushed down. And before the next question, it's also key to know that the latest report found up to 10% of those AI Overviews are not factual. So once again, if your SEO is weak, or if your NAP, meaning your name, address and phone number, isn't updated across all the different platforms, and there are a lot of them, that's also going to produce bad results.
[17:36] Michael Cirillo: Can I emphasize something there for those who are listening? What Brooke just said: 10%. Pause. That's 10% of over a trillion results. Just to quantify that, we're not talking 10 out of every 100 results. We're talking about 10% of over a trillion results returned.
[18:00] Brooke C. Furniss: And it's nuts how many times a week I'm asked, "Well, the AI result said this." I say, "You guys, that's not even remotely true." The result has been tailored to what it thinks it needs. If you actually click on the article, I've seen multiple things happen. It will say it's a Ford article, and it's actually about a Buick GMC or a Honda. The way it pulled it in made it look appropriate for the overview, when in fact it had nothing to do with it.
Or it looks great and seems to prove what it's trying to prove, but when you click on the article, it has nothing to do with that and says the exact opposite. Yet we're taking those AI Overviews as the gold standard, as gospel, and that's just not the case. Any time I see an AI Overview, I always go check the links. Sometimes it's serving up a video that has nothing to do with what the overview says. That's a huge issue.
Going back to what we said at the very beginning: if they're doing SEO, they should be doing true schema markup. Great. Give me the last 10 pages you've optimized in the last three months. I'm going to put each one into the schema validator and see how much schema pops up.
If you don't see anything, keep in mind this is a snapshot in time. It's possible they're running it through a company like WordLift, where it lives more in the JSON. You need to understand how they're doing it. If they're in fact doing schema markup, it's going to show.
Next, I'm going to go into Google Search Console and look back over the last year to see how we're doing. I'm going to expect some drop because AI Overviews are taking up so much space. The standard was around 3.5%. Every bit of research I've done says 3.5% is what your Google Search Console click-through rate should be in automotive. That's where we want to be. If you're at 1.2%, I start to have some questions about whether the SEO company is doing what they say they're doing. If you're seeing really high numbers, that's awesome.
We can also pull those queries and say, "I need to do more content around leasing." Right now, there's a lot of search on EVs and plug-ins because gas prices are so high. Go check your Google Search Console and see where you rank for this stuff. And it shouldn't only be the agency. I would be doing content around it internally as well.
So for me, I'm going to go to schema, and I'm going to go to Google Search Console to see where we're sitting. If they're serving you a third-party tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, that's a predictive algorithm. It estimates what's going to be served up and what people are searching. It's also built around your backyard. If I live in a place with a blinking stoplight, a cow and a cornfield, of course I should rank in my backyard. I need to reach further out.
Google Search Console shows exactly what people are typing in. If you take the top five queries showing up there and compare them to a third-party tool, a lot of times that tool won't even show them, even though one of them is your number one query by impressions and you're getting few clicks on it. So those are the two I would definitely look at.
If they're showing you AI visibility, I go back to: how are they getting that data? Question, question, question. Is it actually their technology? Is it a third-party white label tool? How are they getting that information?
What Gets the Wallet Open
[21:14] Michael Cirillo: I love this. Facts, not feelings, Brooke. Facts, not feelings.
One final question, because I'm always interested in your take and how you coach through this. Over a decade, you've watched really smart operators open their wallets for hype. What are you observing actually gets the wallet to open? Is it fear of missing out? Is it a peer who already brought it in? What keeps this hype cycle going?
[21:51] Brooke C. Furniss: That's a whole other episode in itself, you know that, right?
[21:53] Michael Cirillo: I just opened Pandora's box.
[21:57] Brooke C. Furniss: There are so many things. It's, "Hey, I saw it at such-and-such," insert whatever. Because so-and-so recommended it, whether it's right or not, there's been zero due diligence to see whether it's actually worth having.
I go back to something we may have talked about before: people, process, product. Whatever you're adding can be the greatest thing ever, but if it doesn't integrate with your people, process and product, it sucks. It doesn't matter.
I've seen it come out of a conference or a meeting. There's FOMO for sure. There are so many buzzwords around certain terms that people think, "I've got to do that, because it's the new hot ticket and I don't want to be left out." I don't know if there's one answer for why it happens, but there are definitely a plethora of reasons I've seen, and not just with dealers. Businesses in general go, "Oh, I've got to have that." I think we all do it.
The Buzzword Prediction
[22:49] Michael Cirillo: Okay, I have one more for you, and it's kind of a fun one, because I know you're not afraid to call it how it is. Let's go prediction. What's one marketing buzzword today that you think is going to be embarrassing to talk about a year from now?
[23:07] Brooke C. Furniss: That's a good question.
[23:10] Michael Cirillo: If anybody has one, it's going to be Brooke. I know there's one.
[23:16] Brooke C. Furniss: Right now I feel like every two days there's a new SEO slang acronym getting thrown around. My thought is that at some point it all comes back down to SEO. We're talking about AEO, GEO. That's just really good SEO.
I don't know if we're going to be embarrassed by it, because we keep doing it. Even CDP. You and I talk enough to know people were throwing around CDP like crazy. But if you went and spoke to a group outside of the usual conferences, nobody knew what you were talking about. Nobody. So there are also echo chambers where these things get blown out of proportion. But I'd say something SEO-related, since that's what we've been talking about this entire time.
[24:00] Michael Cirillo: I do worry about what you just said, though: am I in an echo chamber? We cross paths and see all the same people at the same things, and what is that doing to inform my outlook? Then I think, no, I get around enough to know I'm maybe not sitting in an echo chamber. But you're right. You're in those rooms thinking, "Holy crap, everyone knows about this." Then you go to some Chevy dealer in Doglick, Nebraska, who's like, "I don't know what the heck you're talking about right now."
[24:31] Brooke C. Furniss: Amen.
Connect with Brooke and Outro
[24:32] Michael Cirillo: It's always a delight to have you on the show. Thanks so much for joining me. How can those listening or watching connect with you?
[24:41] Brooke C. Furniss: At this point, I think you can just Google me. You and I are "Googleable," as I like to call it. My cell phone's out there, and you can message me on LinkedIn. And my website is bzconsultantsgroup.com. Those texts and emails come right to me, so I always vet them first. But as long as it doesn't look like spam, I will respond.
[25:03] Michael Cirillo: And if you're going to message this woman on LinkedIn, do not start with "Hello, dear." Or "Hello, Brooke C." It's the best. You're the best. Thanks so much for joining me on The Dealer Playbook podcast.
[25:19] Brooke C. Furniss: Thank you.
[25:20] Michael Cirillo: Hey, thanks for listening to The Dealer Playbook podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please subscribe, share and hit that like button. You can also join us and the DPB community on social media. Check back next week for a new Dealer Playbook episode. Thanks so much for joining.
