Straight answers.

VIN Index turns your inventory feed into fast, structured listing pages and a live feed built to be read by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google’s AI, with links and attribution that route inquiries back to you. One feed in, four ways out: a listing page, an endpoint AI can query, your dashboard, and outbound feeds to the major AI shopping surfaces.

Two ways. First, on surfaces that are yours: a fast, structured listing page for each vehicle on your own branded site, plus a live endpoint AI assistants can query directly. Those get read when a shopper is already looking, and they never sit your car next to a competitor. Second, we push your inventory into the AI shopping catalogs themselves, formatted the way Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google each require, so your cars are in the index before anyone searches. Those catalogs are shared by every seller, but even there your result carries your own link and attribution and the inquiry routes to you. Several of these shopping programs are still rolling out, so we publish to each the moment it opens to feeds.

No. SEO chases your rank in Google’s blue links. VIN Index builds a new surface designed for AI discovery, structured so assistants can read your inventory directly and are eligible to cite it. It runs alongside your website and your existing SEO. It does not replace either.

They research and shortlist there first. 44% of shoppers have already used AI car-search tools and 97% of AI users 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). Critically, 41% of AI users say their very next step is visiting the cited dealer or manufacturer site. AI has become the new top of the funnel, not the checkout, and the inquiry still routes to you.

The buying questions shoppers now ask an assistant before they know which dealer to visit: “what’s the most reliable SUV under $20,000,” “what should I buy instead of a RAV4,” “best first car for a teenager,” “cheapest AWD crossover to own.” We give each vehicle grounded answers on reliability, cost to own, and what to cross-shop, drawn from a consensus of frontier AI models and written to be cited, so your car can be the answer to a question the shopper did not even connect to your store yet.

Sometimes, for branded queries, when someone searches your dealership name or a specific car you already rank for. The gap is the discovery questions above, where a shopper describes what they want and never names a dealer. That is where AI tends to recommend a rival and cite an aggregator instead of you, and it is exactly the surface VIN Index is built to win. One AI search on your own inventory shows you the difference.

No, and that honesty is the point. We only publish a reliability or cost-to-own claim when a consensus of frontier AI models agrees it is true for that model. If a car is genuinely average, we say nothing and it simply does not surface for “most reliable,” rather than making a claim that gets you penalized or burns a shopper’s trust. The cars that earn the claim are the ones that show up, which is what makes the ones that do credible.

Not on day one, and that is the honest answer. Those are marketplaces: they place your vehicle next to competing dealers, recommend other cars to your shopper, and profit from traffic across every listing, while you pay to rank below them for your own cars. VIN Index is different: it makes your vehicle the citable source on AI answers, with no competitor around it, so the shopper reaches your listing and the inquiry comes to you. Treat it as additive, an owned channel that reduces your dependence on the marketplaces over time, not a same-day rip-and-replace.

Because this one buys an asset you own, not exposure you rent. A marketplace fee buys placement that vanishes the day you stop paying, on a page that cross-sells your shopper to other dealers’ cars. VIN Index publishes your inventory on your domain, with the inquiry routed straight to your CRM, no per-lead charges and no rival’s car sitting next to yours. It is the channel that makes you less dependent on the fees that keep rising, not another one of them.

You do. VIN Index is not a marketplace and never surrounds your vehicle with competitors’ listings. When an AI assistant cites your vehicle, the shopper reaches your listing and the inquiry comes straight to you with the AI source attached. Your shopper, yours to keep.

One feed, once: the same inventory feed your other vendors already get, over SFTP. No code, no new website, nothing for you to maintain. Most rooftops are live in about an hour after the feed is connected.

Your dashboard shows real AI-referred visits and agent tool activity as confirmed events, first-party telemetry we can actually verify. We deliberately never show an inflated estimated-total-reach number, because no honest version of that number exists.

It comes from your inventory feed, and only your feed. We never scrape your lot or anyone else’s. Every VIN is validated against NHTSA and enriched with market context (for example, 8% below the regional median) so the listing is accurate and machine-readable.

Flat monthly, per rooftop, sized to your lot, for used inventory. No per-lead fees and no surprise increases. Free lists your inventory with facts-only, AI-readable pages, discoverable through the VIN Index agent network — unlimited vehicles. Core adds always-on enriched citation pages, real-time feed sync, tracked AI queries, syndication feeds, and CRM lead delivery: $399/mo up to 100 vehicles, $549 to 300, $649 over 300. Pro adds the query-level funnel, 20 tracked queries refreshed daily, multi-rooftop management, and a custom domain: $699/mo up to 100 vehicles, $899 to 300, $1,099 over 300. Lot size is measured from your own feed and we notify you before any size change takes effect. The Founder cohort gets the full Pro set at $199/mo at any lot size, rate locked 12 months — first 50 rooftops only, then it closes. New-vehicle territories are separate, from $700/mo on top of a used tier: the territory holder gets the enriched merchandising layer for their brand in their market; a non-territory dealer’s new cars still list as facts-only pages and stay agent-discoverable — nobody is delisted.

VIN Index publishes one clearly stated price per vehicle as structured, machine-readable data, so the price a shopper or AI agent sees is the price your listing advertises. The FTC’s CARS Rule was vacated and withdrawn in early 2026, but the underlying standard still applies: under Section 5 of the FTC Act, an advertised price must reflect what a buyer can actually pay, with no hidden mandatory fees, and the FTC is actively enforcing it (it warned 97 dealer groups in March 2026). Some states, like California, add their own pricing-disclosure laws. We give you clean, consistent pricing data to present honestly; you choose the price you publish and remain responsible for your own ad compliance.