Which dealer website platform is most AI-ready? We scanned 4,287 franchise sites.

In September 2026 we ran the readiness checks against every franchise rooftop for fifteen brands across the 25 largest U.S. metros: 4,287 websites. The checks are public and reproducible. Here is what the data says about the platforms those stores sit on.

The headline

The platform is the score. Two stores with the same budget and the same GM land 10 to 15 points apart because of what their website vendor shipped by default. Nobody on any platform is above 62 out of 100, because no platform ships the agent layer.

Platform by platform

Blocked means the site refused a standard desktop browser request from a datacenter address. Those stores are pending a residential rescan and are not scored, which is why Dealer Inspire shows pending. Browse every store on the Readiness Index.

What stands out

Dealer.com turned on llms.txt fleet-wide. 84% of Dealer.com stores serve one, averaging about 237 KB, which is a full site map in text form rather than a two-paragraph summary. It is the largest single agent-readiness rollout any platform has done, and it is why Dealer.com stores average 7 points above DealerOn.

DealerOn has the schema and not the text layer. 99% AutoDealer schema, 11% llms.txt. The schema was the 2023 project. The text layer is the 2026 one.

Team Velocity leads on average. llms.txt on every store in the sample and the highest mean score of any platform with more than 100 rooftops. Still a 46.8, which says more about the ceiling than the platform.

Dealer Inspire blocks automated clients. 1,093 of 1,102 stores refused our request. That is an edge policy, not a store decision. Whether it also blocks GPTBot and ClaudeBot is the question we are answering in the next pass, because if it does, every Dealer Inspire store is invisible to search-grounded AI by default.

Nobody ships the agent layer. Across all 2,699 scored stores: 12 MCP endpoints, 19 machine-readable inventory feeds, 13 AI discovery files. The most valuable 55 points on the scale are essentially unclaimed on every platform.

What a dealer can do about it

You cannot change your platform's defaults, and switching platforms for this would be a bad reason. You can add the layer on top: llms.txt if your platform does not serve one, an inventory feed, an AI discovery file, and an MCP endpoint. That is what PromptGraph deploys, on any platform, without touching the site.

Method notes

Sample: rooftops for Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chevrolet, BMW, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Subaru, Jeep, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge, Volkswagen, Volvo, Mazda, and Mercedes-Benz in the 25 largest metros, mapped by ZIP prefix. Platform detected from page fingerprints; 627 stores could not be attributed, most of them because they blocked the request before a fingerprint could be read. Scanned September 26, 2026. Scores rescanned monthly.

Why is my platform's average low if my store has schema and a sitemap?

Because schema and a sitemap are worth 24 points combined. The agent layer is worth 55, and no platform ships it. A store with every basic in place and nothing else lands around 40.

My store shows as blocked. Does that mean AI cannot see it?

It means an automated browser request from a datacenter was refused. That is a strong hint but not proof. We rescan blocked stores through residential connections and test the AI crawler user agents directly.