Black Lab have just started working with Close Brothers Motor Finance. In his latest article, our Director James explores why the problem they asked us to solve matters far beyond one brand.
The research phase has moved on and yet most brands haven’t. Ask yourself, when did you last start researching a significant financial decision by going directly to a brand’s website? Most people don’t anymore, because they open ChatGPT or Gemini and start asking questions.
“Which lender should I use?”
“Is this company trustworthy?”
“What are customers saying about them?”
The answers they get back are not curated by the brands involved but assembled by AI models which form these answers based on whatever content those models have indexed as authoritative; that might be the brand’s own website, it might be a news article from two years ago, a forum complaint, or a competitor’s marketing.
In motor finance, a high-consideration, trust-led category, this matters enormously, and this is why Close Brothers Motor Finance asked Black Lab to help.
Before we formalised the engagement, we ran some early testing and what we found was consistent with what we see across the automotive finance sector more broadly.
When customers and dealers use AI tools to research Close Brothers Motor Finance, the responses are frequently shaped by external commentary rather than the brand’s own voice. News coverage, regulatory discussion and in some cases a direct recommendation toward a competitor are filling the space where the brand’s own content should be.
If the AI-powered research phase is where customer perception is being formed, and your brand has no voice in that conversation, you have a problem that no amount of paid media spend will fix.
This is not a problem unique for this brand but a problem for most brands operating across automotive, auto insurance, finance and beyond. We see this pattern repeatedly. Established brands with strong reputations, well-run websites and competent marketing teams who have simply not yet built a strategy for AI search visibility.
Until relatively recently, this channel did not exist at scale. Google’s rollout of AI Overviews, and the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and Gemini for research tasks, has happened fast.
The challenge is that the brands that move now will establish a significant advantage. AI models index and cite content based on authority signals that take time to build. The earlier a brand starts structuring its content for this channel, the harder it becomes for competitors to displace them.
What good looks like for AI Search Visibility?
A brand with strong AI search visibility is not necessarily spending more or producing more content but structuring what it has, and what it creates, in a way that AI models recognise as authoritative.
That means understanding how AI tools are currently responding to queries about your brand and your category, knowing which competitors are being cited instead of you and why and having a baseline you can measure improvement against.
It also means treating AI visibility as a commercial channel with commercial metrics, not just a technical concern that lives in the SEO team’s backlog.
3 questions worth asking inside your business to improve AI Search Visbility?
If you lead marketing in automotive or automotive finance, here are the questions your team could start with:
- Open ChatGPT and ask about your brand as a customer would. Is the response accurate or positive? Who or what is being cited?
- Search your core category queries in Gemini. Is your brand present? If a competitor is being recommended instead, what does their content have that yours does not?
- Do you have a way to track your AI share of voice over time? If not, you are optimising blind in a channel that is already influencing customer decisions.
If any of those questions are uncomfortable to answer, that is exactly the point at which we would recommend getting in contact with Black Lab. The question here should not be whether this matters but whether you are measuring it yet.
Interested in understanding your brand’s AI search visibility? Contact our expert AI Visibility Team at Black Lab.
Read or download the full press release here
