Our blog where we rant about things
Nine uses of AI that pay off at franchise dealerships in 2027, across marketing, sales, inventory, service and the GM's desk, with the honest limit on each.
A six-step order for using AI in a car dealership: start with the work nobody does, connect your data, monitor first, gate actions that move money, and treat customer-facing AI as its own project.
Business
The Dealership That Never Needed a Platform: The Comprehensive History of Till's Garage Chevrolet in Bellevue, Iowa, 112 Years Later
A Chevrolet dealer in Bellevue, Iowa with no Core Web Vitals score led to a story worth telling: five generations, a 1914 newspaper ad, a 1931 Pontiac, and a custom website built by a local shop.
We ran 190 live tests with four AI models on 24 dealer websites. AI assistants almost never read llms.txt, the model matters more than the file, and whether your listings are readable without JavaScript decides if the assistant finds your cars.
We mapped every franchise car dealership in the United States — and made it public. Here's why, and what we're building on top of it.
AI Overviews now appear on roughly 47% of searches and can cut organic click-through by 34-65% even when your position never moves. That breaks the assumption behind most dealership SEO reporting. Here's which searches lose the most, and how to tell whether your traffic drop is the SERP or your site.
Stop babysitting your digital presence. Let Astra run it.
Missed VDP traffic. Dead search rankings. Ad spend on the wrong mix. A reputation issue growing undetected. These aren't surprises — they're patterns Astra catches in real time, surfaces with context, and hands you a clear path forward. Not a report. A directive.
