Founder cohort: full Pro at $199/mo, first cohort only

For independent and used-car dealers

When a buyer asks AI for a car, make yours the answer.

Shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google AI what to buy, not who to buy from. VIN Index takes the inventory feed you already export and turns every vehicle into something AI can read, cite, and link, with the buyer sent straight to you, not a listing site.

The check is free, no card, about a minute. Going live takes one feed and about an hour.

Feed synced 14 min ago
leadAttributed to ChatGPT, routed to your CRM

Maple Ridge Auto’s AI visibility, trending up

+5.2%
Last 30 daysAll platformsExport
312
AI-referred visits
47
Agent tool calls
9
Attributed leads

AI-referred visits

before VIN Index, dashed

FebMarAprMayJunJul
  • ChatGPT143
  • Copilot84
  • Google AI59
  • Perplexity26

sample dashboard, illustrative · confirmed events only

The questions buyers now ask AI

  • Most reliable SUV under $20,000?

    asked in ChatGPT

    MR
  • Best first car for a teenager?

    asked in Copilot

    DL
  • What should I buy instead of a RAV4?

    asked in Perplexity

    AK
  • Cheapest AWD crossover to own?

    asked in Google AI

    JS
  • Is a 2019 Forester a good buy at 75k km?

    asked in ChatGPT

    EM
  • Best used truck for towing under $30k?

    asked in Copilot

    RT
  • Which hybrid holds its value best?

    asked in ChatGPT

    HL
  • Good family minivan near me under $25k?

    asked in Google AI

    PF
  • What does a fair all-in price look like?

    asked in Perplexity

    CN
  • Best car for a new driver in the snow?

    asked in ChatGPT

    SW

Every one of these is a chance for your car to be the answer. VIN Index makes each vehicle a source an assistant can read, cite, and link, so the buyer lands with you.

Why now

Buyers already moved. Their first stop is an AI assistant.

44%
of car shoppers have already used AI tools to shop, and 97% say it will shape their decision.

Cars.com, 2025

25%
of new-vehicle buyers used AI in their journey in 2025, the first year it was tracked.

Cox Automotive, 2025

50%
roughly the drop in clicks to traditional results once an AI summary appears.

Pew Research, 2025

Shoppers who arrive from an AI assistant tend to be higher-intent. They already asked a question and got your car as the answer.

The trap

You pay to rank below the sites you pay.

Listing sites take thousands a month, then outrank your own store for your own cars, surround your vehicle with competitors, and cross-sell your shopper to other dealers’ cars. You are paying to be made more dependent.

What’s a good used RAV4 near me under $25k?

Great match: the 2020 Toyota RAV4 XLE AWD at Maple Ridge Auto$23,900.Source: autotrader.com

The car you asked for

2020 Toyota RAV4 XLE AWDYou

Maple Ridge Auto

$23,900

Other dealers on this page — 47 results

2020 RAV4 LE

Northgate Motors

$21,450

Great deal

2019 RAV4 XLE

City Auto Group

$22,900

Good deal

2021 RAV4 LE

Prime Cars

$23,100

Great deal

2020 RAV4 XLE

Summit Motors

$22,600

Great deal

2019 RAV4 LE

Lakeshore Auto

$21,900

Great deal

2021 RAV4 XLE

Metro Toyota

$24,200

Fair deal

2020 RAV4 LE

Valley Motors

$22,100

Great deal

2019 RAV4 XLE

Cardinal Auto

$22,750

Good deal

2021 RAV4 LE

Riverside Cars

$23,400

Great deal

2020 RAV4 XLE

Eastgate Motors

$22,950

Great deal

Customer lost

Gone to a competitor in the list.

  1. 1A shopper asks AI for a carTheir first stop is an assistant, not a lot.
  2. 2AI cites your carGreat — but the source is autotrader.com.
  3. 3The tap opens a wall of rivalsEvery competing dealer, not your store.
  4. 4They scroll past you, and you lose the saleYour shopper vanishes into the list.

Outranked

Your monthly fee funds the SEO machine that beats your own site for your own inventory.

Siphoned

Your car pulls the shopper in; the page shows them every competitor right next to it.

Cross-sold

The inquiry on your car comes to you, but the platform keeps nudging that same shopper toward other dealers’ cars, and keeps the data.

AI is the first real chance to flip it, because it cites a source instead of selling a grid of your competitors.

See the full case

How it works

One feed, once. Live in about an hour.

No new website, no code, nothing for your team to learn. You point the same inventory feed your other vendors already get at VIN Index, and the rest is automatic.

01

Connect your feed

The same inventory feed your other vendors get, over SFTP. One-time setup, no code, no new website for your team.

02

We structure and publish it

Every VIN decoded, validated, and enriched, then published as pages, a live endpoint, your dashboard, and outbound feeds.

03

You become the cited source

When a buyer finds your car through AI and contacts you, the lead lands in your CRM with agent-attribution attached.

Your dashboard

Know the questions you win, and the buyers they send.

Shoppers ask assistants the same buying questions your showroom hears every day. We track the ones that matter in your market and show you, assistant by assistant, whether your store is the answer — then every visit, tool call, and lead that follows lands as a confirmed event, attributed back to its AI source.

tracked queries · your marketcited on 4 of 5
  • best used AWD SUV under $18,000 near HamiltonChatGPT: you are citedCopilot: you are citedPplx: you are citedGemini: not citedyour store
  • is the 2019 Subaru Forester reliable?ChatGPT: you are citedCopilot: you are citedPplx: not citedGemini: you are citedyour store
  • used SUV around $300 a month in HamiltonChatGPT: you are citedCopilot: not citedPplx: you are citedGemini: not citedyour store
  • bad credit SUV financing near meChatGPT: not citedCopilot: not citedPplx: not citedGemini: not citedaggregator
  • Forester vs CR-V used — which to buy?ChatGPT: you are citedCopilot: you are citedPplx: you are citedGemini: you are citedyour store

One query still cites an aggregator. That is the gap the enriched pages and credit-ready facet pages go after next.

sample queries, illustrative · re-checked weekly on Core, daily on Pro

confirmed eventslive
312
AI visits
47
tool calls
9
leads
1,400
crawls
  • 41mGPTBotcrawled your Forester VDP · full HTMLverified
  • 33mPplxBotfetched sitemap + 3 listing pagesverified
  • 19mChatGPTbuyer referred → Forester VDPai-referred
  • 12mClaudesearch_inventory({ body: "SUV" })tool call
  • 4mCopilotbuyer referred → your inventoryai-referred
  • nowChatGPTlead → your CRM · source attachedattributed

sample stream, illustrative · hit type × platform · never an estimated traffic number

The questions, tracked

The real buying queries in your market — payment, credit, cross-shop — re-run on ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini. You see exactly where you are cited, and where an aggregator still owns the answer.

The events, confirmed

Verified crawls, AI-referred visits, and agent tool calls, each tied to a platform and a vehicle. Two axes, never mixed, and never an estimated traffic number — because no honest one exists.

The leads, attributed

Every lead lands in your CRM stamped with its AI source and the vehicle it came from, so you can draw a straight line from the feed you connected to the buyer who showed up.

Here is everything that one feed becomes.

Your cars reach AI two ways: they get read when a buyer is already looking, and they get pushed into the AI shopping catalogs ahead of time. Every vehicle, published four ways and refreshed within an hour of any change.

Readable

AI and search crawlers can access clean, static vehicle pages, no JavaScript required.

Structured

Each VIN carries schema, specs, price, availability, dealer info, and canonical links.

Attributable

Clicks and leads from AI and search channels can be tracked back to the source.

01

A listing page built to be cited

Fast, static, schema-rich pages that answer the real questions buyers ask, reliability, cost to own, what to cross-shop, in grounded language built to be cited. Branded to you.

Dealer listing page rendered on its own branded site
02

A live endpoint AI can query

Assistants do not just read the page. They query your live inventory by the exact criteria a shopper cares about, pull the full spec and offer for any match, and every answer is attributed back to you.

> search_inventory({
    body: "SUV",
    drivetrain: "AWD",
    price_max: 18000,
    max_km: 100000
  })

  -> 2019 Subaru Forester 2.5i
     VIN JF2SKADC9KH..., 74,200 km
     $17,900 all-in, 8% below market
     financing scenarios + condition notes

> get_vehicle("JF2SKADC...")
     full spec, photos, attributed to you
03

A dashboard for you

312
AI-referred visits
47
Agent tool calls
9
Attributed leads
1.4k
Crawls verified

Confirmed events only. Never a made-up traffic number.

04

Pushed into AI shopping

We format your inventory for the AI shopping catalogs, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and Google, and publish to each as it opens to feeds, refreshed about every four hours.

The outbound push

Your cars inside AI shopping, before anyone searches

Your pages and endpoint wait to be read. This one does not. We format your inventory the way Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google each want it and feed it straight into their AI shopping catalogs, so when a shopper browses cars inside an assistant, yours is already in the index.

What the buyer does

“Show me AWD SUVs under $18,000 near Hamilton.”

asked inside Copilot shopping

The assistant answers from its shopping catalog, the index we feed your inventory into, not from a live crawl of your site.

Where your car shows up

shopping resultyour listing, attributed
vehicle
2019 Subaru Forester 2.5i
seller
Maple Ridge Auto
price (all-in)
$17,900
link
mapleridge.vinindex.ai/…

One honest note. These shopping catalogs are shared by every seller, so this is the one surface where your car can sit near another dealer’s. Even there it carries your own link and attribution and the inquiry routes to you, while your own listing pages and endpoint stay competitor-free. Several of these programs are still rolling out, so we publish to each the moment it opens to feeds.

We don’t promise rankings. We make you indexable.

AI platforms decide what to crawl, cite, and rank. VIN Index gives your inventory the strongest technical foundation to be discovered.

  • Clean HTML pages
  • Structured vehicle data
  • Canonical URLs
  • Fresh inventory updates
  • Source attribution

The question every dealer asks

“So do I have to quit AutoTrader?”

No. Not on day one, and that is the honest answer. Keep what is working while VIN Index builds you an owned channel where you are the cited answer, and let it carry more of the load each month. It is additive, a way to reduce the dependency over time, not a same-day rip-and-replace.

Whose side we’re on

Built for dealers, not for the aggregators.

VIN Index makes money one way: a flat monthly fee. We never broker your leads, resell your traffic, or sit between you and your buyer. The incentive is simple — your listings get cited — and the terms reflect that.

  • No contract
  • Cancel anytime
  • No per-lead fees
  • Flat monthly, sized to your lot

Your shopper.
Yours to keep.

Listing marketplaces put your vehicle next to competing dealers and nudge your shopper toward other cars. They run on traffic and impressions, so they win when shoppers keep browsing. VIN Index makes your vehicle the cited source on AI answers, with no competitor carousel around it. The AI never flags your price as high, and when a shopper is cross-shopping something pricier, your car is framed as the smarter buy on real market pricing, never by knocking the other car. The shopper reaches your listing, and the inquiry comes straight to you.

You

get the inquiry, with full agent-attribution to your CRM.

The shopper

contacts you directly through your own page.

No competitors

sit beside your car or pull the shopper away.

Around your vehicle

Listing sites

Competing dealers’ listings and “similar cars” suggestions.

VIN Index

Just your vehicle, cited as the source.

What they optimize for

Listing sites

Traffic, impressions, and clicks across every listing.

VIN Index

Getting the shopper to your vehicle and your store.

Where your shopper goes next

Listing sites

Any other dealer on the platform.

VIN Index

To you.

How it makes money

Listing sites

Paid placement and ad impressions. You compete for attention on your own car.

VIN Index

A flat monthly rate. You are the answer, not one of twenty.

The inquiry

Listing sites

Routed through the marketplace.

VIN Index

Comes straight to you with the AI source attached.

Listing sites sell attention across every dealer on the page. VIN Index makes your vehicle the answer, so the shopper comes to you.

Pricing

Used inventory. Flat monthly, per rooftop. No per-lead charges.

Founder

First cohort only

$199/mo

The full Pro feature set, rate locked 12 months while subscribed. First cohort only — when it fills, this closes.

Core

$399/mo

Per rooftop, from $399, sized to your lot. Always-on enrichment for your used inventory, real-time feed sync, the AI endpoint, tracked queries, outbound feeds, and your leads. No per-lead fees, ever.

Free lists your used inventory with facts-only, AI-readable pages, no card required. Pro from $699/mo adds the query-level funnel, 20 tracked AI queries refreshed daily, multi-rooftop management, and a custom domain. Paid tiers are sized to your lot; Free is unlimited. New-vehicle territories are sold separately.

Learn how AI visibility works

Plain-English guides on how AI assistants find, read, and cite dealership inventory, and the practical playbook to make yours visible.

Can AI find your cars today?

Run a free check on your current AI visibility. We show you how readable your inventory is to ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google AI, and what is holding you back. No card.