Auto Parts: How to Optimize for AI Search

This article on how to optimize for AI search was written entirely by a real human and published April, 2025.

If you sell auto parts and accessories, do you know how to optimize your website for AI search? Gone are the simpler days when you could get organic traffic from the search engines just by having an optimized article on your site or optimized product pages for parts and accessories.

For auto parts, and SEO, and AI all to work together nicely, we have to get technical. It’s time to discuss schema.

Here’s why optimizing for AI search is important:

Don’t be like Bobby.

You might have the most in-depth and detailed DIY guide to replacing automobile control arms on your website, but if the search robots that crawl your site can’t understand the article, it won’t be indexed and it won’t be found.

At least not on the first page of Google’s AI Overviews search results, or in an AI platform like ChatGPT.

Your content must include elements that make it easy for search engines to understand what it’s about. In turn, search engines need to understand what keywords make your content relevant to your visitors’ search. SEO isn’t just about optimizing words. It hasn’t been for over a decade. SEO—done well—always had a technical side. Today, that technical side of SEO is more important than ever. We’ll show you why and how below.

Karsten Madsen at Morningscore is predicting that AI chat will have just over a 14% share of search by 2028.

Let us brag for just two sentences:

We’ve been preaching the use of schema for years, because it was important even before AI took over search. We were right about schema back then, and we’re right today.

Thanks. Back to the article!

How to optimize for AI search: Structured data and AI readability

In SEO or website design, schema (or structured data) is a special type of code. It helps search engines better understand your website’s content. You don’t see it on a page, it’s in the code. It’s like giving search engines a detailed label for each part of a page so they can display rich results (such as review star ratings, product prices, FAQs, or location details) in the search engine results page (SERP).

However, it’s not just about getting rich results; schema can also assist in “describing” your content to the search crawlers. Search bots can understand if your product is new or used, on sale or regular price, in stock or not, part number, and more.

For example:

• If you’re selling a car battery, schema can tell search engines important details, like price, brand, and customer reviews—which might appear in search results as a rich snippet.
• If you have a “How to Install a Lift Kit” guide, schema can mark it as an article or how-to, helping search engines display it properly.
• If you do have a how-to article, schema can include a list of relevant FAQs.
• For a store locator, schema can provide business hours, address, and contact details, making it easier for customers to find your locations, because that information gets picked up for local search results.

You must also have clear headlines on web pages, content that is accessible (easy to find), and content that is easy to understand and use.

By adding structured data to well structured content, your product listings and pages will stand out in search results, increasing their visibility and generating more clicks!

NOTE: Also see AI Search Optimization Case Studies for Auto Parts and The Future of AI in the Automotive Industry.

Optimize for your product listings

Making your products more visible and appealing to AI-driven search engines, including Google, will make them stand out among thousands of other products in organic search.

You may not know this, but Google will even list your products for free under the Google Shopping tab of the search results. However, if the search bot can’t understand your product page, it won’t list your product for sale.

Here’s a screen shot from Google Shopping for tonneau covers. These are all free listings.

It may be hard to see, but notice the first two listings have a message from Google in the lower left corner that these are in stock and also available locally, instead of having to buy online. That’s schema at work.

Here is the schema code for the very first product in the free Google Shopping listing. Now, we admit, that is definitely hard to see in this image.

You may not be able to see it, but all of the information about the product is in the schema code. This is the code that search engines look for, helping them understand everything about the product. If the schema code is absent or is not formatted correctly, it will be ignored, and so will your product.

How to optimize for informational searches

Your site content needs to be optimized to answer specific questions. That’s a different way to optimize, instead of other traditional ways to produce high-quality content.

Also, uing schema is now practically a requirement if you want to optimize for AI search. This is how to show up for searches on Google asking how to do something, where to find something, who to ask something…these are called informational search. Google’s AI Overviews need schema to show up.

Here’s an example of Google results for a search query, “How can automotive data management increase your parts sales?” Stick with us, this will be a little self-serving, but hopefully educational, too (you can click to enlarge). This page was optimized for AI search.

This result on Google quotes a page on our website, shows our website favicon, and has a link to that page. Pretty cool? That’s done with schema (and outstanding, informational, unique content).

There’s also a bit of our white-hat “secret sauce” SEO done to that page but hey, we can’t give all our secrets away!

Here’s another result on Google. This one quotes our website, along with some other websites farther down, in a Google AI Overview result. In this case our page is at the top, it quotes (more or less) our webpage on the left, and on the right displays an exact quote with a link in the AI Overview.

Again, done with schema and high-quality content, optimized for AI search. And that “secret sauce.”

LLMS.txt files

An LLMS.txt file is a new standard to help AI bots understand what your website content is about.

Believe it or not, as of April, 2025 (when this article was published) AI still has difficulty understanding some topics, especially topics that have complexity or nuance. That’s where an LLMS.txt file, as well as schema, can help out.

This file is called a “mark down” file and is technically still a proposal for a standard, although many websites are already using it. It was proposed by Jeremy Howard, an entrepreneur and technologist from Australia. LLMS.txt files are too complex a subject to go into detail here, but we may cover it in the future.

Optimize for search on your own website

How good is your site’s built-in site search function? Can users get instant suggestions as they type what they are looking for? Does your site know what vehicle your customer drives and whether the part they want to order will fit? AI can help with all of those features and more. Ask your web developer how to optimize your website for AI search, so shoppers can easily find what they want.

When was your website built? If it’s older than 5 years, it’s out of date. Today’s consumers want and expect a personalized experience when shopping on the internet and older websites probably can’t do that. Not only that, but consumers have very little patience for a slow site. With a delay of just a few seconds for a page to load, a potential customer will go elsewhere.

How to optimize for AI search in your advertising

Optimizing for AI isn’t just for SEO. Google Ads has a campaign format called Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) that uses AI. This type of ad lets Google crawl your website, and then create ads based on what it finds.

Your website content is important, and Google says DSAs work best with “websites with well-written HTML page titles and clearly-written content.” Google also reads any schema to help it understand a page. (There are many ways to control, manage and optimize DSAs, but that’s another article, another time.)

Conclusion

Optimizing a website is now much different in the AI world. Things are evolving and changing almost daily and this article may be outdated soon! But jump in and learn how AI is changing how consumers find products if you want to be competitive in the future.

How to cite this AI article and content

This article is copyrighted, but hey, it’s polite to share! This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and can be distributed or quoted, with attribution given to Hedges & Company, and a link back to this article from your website.