Performance Communications | July 8, 2026
The face of search has changed forever and the pace at which it’s doing so is quicker than ever. At the start of the year, half of UK adults were using LLM-based AI tools to find car information. Now, as we enter H2, that number is already at two-thirds – and growing.
The era of a list of blue links and traffic funnelled direct to your website is over. Replaced instead by an aggregated response from AI, pulling information from a range of sources.
It’s an uncertain time for PR, marketing, and commercial teams, as they understand how and where they need to be for their brands to be seen by customers.
That’s why we created Engine Room, the AI visibility and content agent engineered for the car industry. To make sense of the data and put the power back in the hands of communication leaders.
Welcome to the AI MOT. The first report where we lift the bonnet on six things Engine Room has learnt so far this year…
The Top 5
While most AI search analysis tracks brand mentions, it’s an over-simplified approach to a complex topic. At Engine Room, we use a more nuanced metric. We call it our composite score.
The composite score combines mention frequency with quality signals like sentiment, recommendation rate and position in the response. This gives a true measure of how a brand actually performs in AI-generated searches.
Toyota is doing the best job of appearing, followed by Hyundai, Kia, BMW and Volkswagen. It’s close, though, with very little to choose between them… and the picture changes when we look at searches within individual categories. More on that later.
The platform gap
The composite score takes an overall snapshot of AI search, combining equally weighted results across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overview. Very few people use all when starting their search and instead favour one (just like Alta Vista, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves at the start of the search engine era). And that matters more than you think.
At Engine Room, we call it ‘the platform gap’. The same report run across the four main LLMs reveals some striking differences.
For example, three of our Top 5 overall – Toyota, BMW and Kia – have five times as many mentions on ChatGPT as they do on Gemini.
In the UK, Google remains the most likely starting point for car buyers, and therefore the importance of Google AI Overview increases. So, who is winning the battle here?
Toyota clings on to top spot, while BMW vaults into second. Mercedes makes an appearance in the Top 5 with Volkswagen dropping out.
This just goes to highlight that there isn’t a single answer for AI – it’s multi-layered and ever-evolving landscape. Automotive brands need to track the difference to make sure they’re showing up where it matters.
The ZEV mandate
Suggestions that the ZEV mandate – 2030 targets for EV sales – might be weakened is playing into the hands of those manufacturers who rank highly for hybrid searches.
Currently, 80 per cent of new car sales need to be pure EV by 2030 but that could be watered down to 50 per cent. With the ban on new petrol and diesels set to continue, that leaves the remaining half to be made up by hybrids.
That’s sending more people to start researching cars powered by hybrid technology. Engine Room tracks mentions across individual categories, such as family, electric and practicality, and the most common prompts associated with them.
It’s Toyota, Honda and Renault which appear at the top of prompts related to hybrid vehicles and are benefitting for a renewed interest in the technology caused by the ZEV mandate news.
The biggest movers
The Top 5 reflects the best performers over the first half of the year but that’s just a static snapshot. Engine Room is constantly tracking which brands AI assistants recommend to present a live picture – not just about which brands are getting mentioned but which ones get pushed forward as the answer.
Tracking questions around new car recommendations and ‘best cars for’ we can see that between April and June, Hyundai and BMW recorded the biggest gains – both up two percentage points.
What does this tell us? The AI search revolution is just beginning and with new models, new content and new third-party sources, the way car buyers are finding brands is a constantly moving target. AI visibility is not a ‘set and forget’ issue, it requires a dynamic strategy driven by intelligence granularity.
The power of YouTube
We’ve established that there’s a PLATFORM GAP when it comes how different LLMs promote different brands. In part that’s driven by where the AI is pulling its information from.
One of the sources that ranks particularly highly across all categories is YouTube. Whether you’re asking your AI assistant about best family cars, the EVs with the longest range or which car has Apple CarPlay, YouTube channels consistently rank in the top three most cited.
Learning? Get your car talked about on videos that are uploaded to YouTube and make sure the message is consistent… which brings us onto our final point.
Press coverage is king
While YouTube ranks consistently highly, earned media is king. It’s the real fuel of AI visibility.
LLMs are built to answer questions and do so in a conversational, human-to-human way. They form opinions and construct responses from what journalists, reviewers and independent media and trusted third-party sources say about a brand.
And that’s all based on training and live data.
In other words, there’s more old reviews than new ones. That means brands that have positively dominated the news historically have a headstart in the AI era. New brands and those brands that media don’t report on (or report on unfavourably) are almost invisible to consumers using AI search.
Earned media has always been important. Now it’s the algorithm.
