DealerOn OnPrompt Aims to Master Dealership Visibility in AI Search

ROCKVILLE, MD – May 05, 2026 – As the car buying journey increasingly begins with a question posed to an AI assistant, automotive digital marketing firm DealerOn has launched OnPrompt, a new platform designed to give dealerships visibility and influence in the age of AI-powered search. The move signals a critical shift in digital strategy, moving beyond traditional search engine optimization (SEO) to manage how businesses are perceived and recommended by platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

DealerOn, a major provider of websites and marketing solutions for over 7,000 dealerships, announced the new platform today. It aims to address a growing anxiety among local businesses: if customers are asking AI for recommendations, how do you ensure you’re part of the answer? OnPrompt is designed to monitor how a dealership is represented in AI-generated responses, analyze brand sentiment, and identify content gaps on their own websites that prevent AI from understanding their business accurately.

"Search isn't disappearing—it's evolving," said Ali Amirrezvani, CEO and Co-Founder of DealerOn, in the official announcement. "As shoppers turn to AI-generated answers to decide where to buy and service vehicles, dealers need visibility into how their business is being represented. OnPrompt gives them a clear, practical way to understand and influence this new layer of discovery alongside traditional SEO."

The AI Co-Pilot in Car Shopping

The launch comes at a pivotal moment for the automotive industry. The process of researching a new vehicle is no longer confined to manufacturer websites and traditional search engine results. Recent studies highlight a dramatic uptake in AI as a research tool. A November 2025 survey from Cars.com revealed that 44% of car shoppers had already used AI tools for vehicle research, with an overwhelming 97% stating the technology would influence their future purchase decisions.

This trend is reshaping the top of the sales funnel. Consumers are using AI in the initial “Learn” phase to ask complex questions about model comparisons, reliability, pricing, and local dealer reputations. Data shows that these AI platforms are becoming a significant source of referral traffic, with one report noting a 43% jump in LLM-driven visits to dealership websites in a single month last fall. This means that by the time a potential customer lands on a dealership’s website, their opinions may have already been shaped by an AI-generated summary.

For dealerships, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Being omitted from an AI’s list of “best local dealers for EV service” or being inaccurately summarized can mean losing a customer before the dealership even knew they were in the market. Tools like OnPrompt are being positioned as essential for navigating this new reality.

Beyond Keywords: Managing an AI-Driven Reputation

OnPrompt’s feature set reflects a new discipline emerging from the foundations of SEO, sometimes called "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO). Instead of focusing solely on keywords, the goal is to ensure the underlying data and content about a business are so clear, authoritative, and comprehensive that AI models can accurately interpret and represent them.

Core features of the platform include:

• Prompt Tracking: Simulating common consumer queries to see how AI platforms respond regarding a specific dealership, its inventory, and its services.
• Visibility and Sentiment Analysis: Determining not just if a dealership is mentioned, but how. The platform analyzes the tone and substance of AI responses to gauge brand perception.
• Content Gap Identification: Pinpointing weaknesses on a dealership's own website—such as missing information about service offerings or unclear business hours—that could lead to poor or inaccurate AI summaries.
• Competitor Analysis: Benchmarking a dealer’s AI visibility against local and regional competitors.

Digital marketing experts stress that AI models are not inventing answers from thin air; they are synthesizing information from content across the web. High-quality website content, structured data, and, critically, customer reviews are the raw materials AI uses. A dealership’s online reputation, built over years through customer feedback, has become a primary signal for AI in determining trustworthiness and authority. The new platform aims to help dealers understand how these signals are being interpreted and where they need to bolster their digital footprint.

A New Frontier in Digital Marketing

DealerOn is a prominent player entering a rapidly forming market for AI visibility tools. The challenge OnPrompt seeks to solve is not unique to the auto industry, and a number of technology companies are developing similar solutions. Platforms like Ayzeo and Local Falcon are offering tools for local businesses to track their presence in AI answers, while established SEO giants like Semrush and Ahrefs are integrating AI visibility tracking into their existing toolkits.

Within the automotive sector itself, companies like Reputation.com have already launched AI-powered suites to help dealers manage their online presence in this new context. The emergence of these competing tools underscores the legitimacy of the problem and suggests a new arms race is beginning, focused on optimizing for AI-driven discovery.

To help dealers not only identify issues but also act on them, DealerOn is concurrently launching OnPrompt GEO Services. This managed service is designed to translate the platform's findings into concrete content and technical optimization strategies. This pairing of a diagnostic tool with a hands-on service acknowledges that many dealerships will need expert guidance to adapt their websites and marketing to effectively communicate with AI crawlers and systems.

With OnPrompt now available in beta, DealerOn is betting that providing clarity in the opaque world of AI answers will be the next crucial service for the thousands of dealerships navigating a landscape where the first interaction with a customer may be with a machine.