How Automotive Awards Are Shaping AI Visibility

Performance Communications | October 5, 2026

According to Engine Room, the RAC editorial pages are the fifth-most cited domain in AI search with the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AIO and Perplexity behind CarWow, What Car?, Auto Express and YouTube.

This year saw the launch of the RAC New Car Awards. So how did this impact its AI visibility?

RAC announced its shortlist in early August and the winners a month later. Over the last 30 days, the Shortlist and Winners pages held the #1 and #2 spots among all cited automotive pages for over 1,000 unbranded, top of funnel questions.

More impressive when you consider RAC’s awards citations are around 95% self-generated. Over half of the citations about the What Car? and Auto Express Awards are from manufacturers and dealers amplifying their wins.

Given the importance of Recency as a LLM signal, and the decay of fresh content over time, the RAC is also getting outsized reach with almost no third-party help.

This acts as an indication of how critical awards from trusted specialist media like What Car? will be in the future as the LLM models continue to evolve, and old training data is replaced by new content.

Since the announcement of the winners on 10th September, award-winning models are also seeing a genuine, measurable lift in AI mentions.

Analysing mentions in AI answers via Engine Room, we can see that winning models have seen a considerable increase in mentions – up 5.8% from the previous week.

The Kia EV2, has seen triple digit growth from before the shortlist was unveiled.

Meanwhile, the Fiat Grande Panda has also seen very strong growth in mentions of almost 40% from the shortlist announcement.

So why this impact?

Awards and shortlist content is exactly the kind of bitesize, structured, list-format page LLMs like to pull from when answering “best car for X” style questions.

It’s evergreen and gets reused across many different queries rather than answering one narrow question. A perfect citation source.

We shouldn’t discount the authority of the RAC, either. As a recognised UK motoring institution (and ranking as the fifth most cited domain), even new awards are likely to be picked over less established sources.

In this new world, it’ll be interesting to see how rival automotive awards impact citations in the future.

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