What you get back.
Most automotive SEO audits open on rankings. This one opens on citations, because a dealer group can hold page-one positions and still go unnamed every time a buyer asks an AI engine which store to use. Four things come back.
- Whether you get named. Real buyer-intent prompts for your market, run against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. For most dealer groups the honest answer is that they are never named, which is worth knowing before it is worth fixing.
- Who gets named instead. The competitors the engines actually recommend in your market, and how consistently. This is usually the part that gets attention internally.
- Which URLs the engines cited. The sources they pulled to justify the answer. It is the most actionable field in the report, because it shows exactly which pages and which third-party sources are doing the work.
- The most significant reasons why. The technical, schema, or entity issues standing between your site and a citation, ranked by how much they matter.
It arrives by email, usually within two to three business days. No call is required to receive it, and if you would rather not talk afterwards, nothing further happens.
This is deliberately narrower than the technical audit a paying engagement opens with, which is full-scope, severity-scored, and takes considerably longer to produce. This one is a baseline read, and it is free because the data is usually enough on its own to tell a group whether this is a problem worth anyone's money.
What an automotive SEO audit covers.
A full automotive SEO audit for a dealer group covers four layers. It reads crawl and index behavior across every SRP and VDP template, scores schema and entity markup against what crawlers and answer engines actually consume, maps keyword cannibalization across rooftops and legacy pages, and inspects the Google Business Profile estate store by store. Every finding carries a severity score, so the first month of work is decided before anyone writes a word of content. That is the document a paying engagement opens with, and it takes considerably longer to produce than the free read this form returns.
The free version on this page takes the top of that stack. It answers the one thing a standard ranking report cannot: when a buyer in your market asks an AI engine which dealer to use, does your name come back, and if it does not, what is standing in the way. The findings are real findings from the same method, cut down to the handful that explain the citation result.
Where the paid audit goes deeper:
- Crawl, render, and template structure. SRP and VDP indexation, parameter handling, faceted results, and the markup layer underneath all of it. See technical SEO for car dealerships.
- Citation and entity work. The ongoing generative engine optimization program behind a citation result, rather than the one-time read this form produces.
- The local estate. Profile structure and map-pack capture per rooftop, which is its own discipline. See local SEO for car dealerships.
- Query-class economics. Which of a dealer site's four query classes still return a click worth chasing, and which ones AI answers have already absorbed. See car dealership SEO.
- Group-level structure. How rooftops in one market stop competing with each other for a single position. See dealer group SEO.
What the paid work costs is published rather than quoted on a call, so the budget question can be settled before an audit ever lands. See automotive SEO pricing and the full range of automotive SEO services.
Before you send it.
What does an automotive SEO audit include?
A full automotive SEO audit covers four layers: crawl and index behavior across SRP and VDP templates, schema and entity markup validated against what crawlers and answer engines actually consume, keyword cannibalization across every rooftop and legacy page, and the Google Business Profile estate store by store. Findings are severity-scored so the first month of work is already decided. The free version on this page covers the citation layer and the findings behind it.
How long does an automotive SEO audit take?
The free baseline read is emailed in two to three business days, and audits are run in the order they arrive, so queue position moves that. The full technical audit a paying engagement opens with takes considerably longer, because it is full-scope and severity-scored across every template and every rooftop rather than a sample of them.
Is it really free?
Yes. No cost and no obligation. Receiving it does not require taking a call. It is deliberately limited in scope: a baseline citation read plus the most significant technical findings, rather than the full severity-scored technical audit a paying engagement opens with.
What's the catch?
There isn't one, but there is a limit. VulcanAX takes a maximum of five dealer groups at a time and holds one client per market, so audits get run in the order they arrive and availability is genuinely finite. Sometimes the audit comes back saying the problem isn't SEO at all, in which case you get told that instead of a proposal.
Do I have to get on a sales call?
No. The report is emailed. If you want to talk it through afterwards there's a calendar link, and if you don't, nothing further happens. There is no SDR, and nobody will call the number you didn't give.
What if I'm already paying someone for SEO?
Then the audit is arguably more useful, because it is a read on the surface your current vendor is least likely to be reporting on. Plenty of groups have a competent SEO provider and zero AI citation presence; those two facts are compatible and the second one is invisible in a standard ranking report. More on why those diverge →
What happens to my data?
The domain and email go to one inbox, read by one person. No list and no drip sequence. Nothing is resold. See the privacy policy.