SmartSites Co-Founder, Alex Melen, Releases Second Edition of Automotive Search Marketing, Now Available on Amazon

The fully revised guide for car dealers adds an entire section on AI search and draws on 2026 data from the dealerships SmartSites manages

PARAMUS, NJ, UNITED STATES, October 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Alex Melen, co-founder of SmartSites, whose car dealership digital marketing practice works with more than 90 dealers, today announced the release of the second edition of Automotive Search Marketing: A Car Dealer's Guide to Google & AI Search, available now on Amazon. Written for dealer principals, general managers and marketing directors rather than for agencies, the book explains how dealerships win customers on Google and, for the first time, inside the AI answers that now appear above the results on roughly half of US searches.

The second edition keeps the SEO and paid-search playbooks of the original, updates every benchmark to 2026 and adds a new five-chapter part on AI search: how AI Overviews, Google's AI Mode and ChatGPT decide which dealership to name, a seven-move playbook for getting named, how to advertise inside AI answers, and how to measure a channel that often never sends a click. It also includes a twelve-item AI readiness checklist that a dealer can hand to any website provider.

"When I wrote the first edition, a search result was ten blue links. Today the AI answer is the new number one position, and it is built from the same raw material as a good organic result: pages that answer the question in the first sentence, real prices, real photos, and a Google Business Profile with specific reviews," said Alex Melen, co-founder of SmartSites. "The dealers who did that work are being cited by the AI engines. The dealers who paid for two generic blog posts a month are not. I rewrote the book so a dealer can tell the difference."

Unlike most marketing guides, the book relies on first-party data from the dealerships SmartSites manages rather than industry averages. Among the findings it reports: the ranked, numbered buying guide is now the most-cited content format in AI answers; a program that published 831 new pages across 31 dealerships in the summer of 2026 had 87 percent of them indexed and earning impressions within five weeks; model-research pages roughly quadrupled one Honda store's AI-feature impressions in eight weeks; and AI assistants recommend about one percent of business locations, where Google's local map pack shows more than a third of them.

The book also takes a direct position on OEM-certified vendor programs, which Melen argues add a layer of fees between the dealer and the work, and it closes with the five questions a dealer should ask any search or AI-visibility vendor before signing.

"The single most common problem I find at a dealership is that the people paying the invoices cannot see their own data," Melen said. "If you own your Google Ads, Analytics and Search Console accounts and understand what you are looking at, no vendor can talk you into a bad decision. That has not changed since the first edition. What has changed is that the answer to the buyer's question is now written by a machine, and it is reading your website to write it."

About the book
Automotive Search Marketing: A Car Dealer's Guide to Google & AI Search, second edition, is organized in five parts: search engine optimization, paid search, AI search, measurement, and choosing an agency and tools. It is available now on Amazon in the second edition. Companion articles with current data from the dealerships SmartSites manages are being published on the SmartSites blog through 2027.

About Alex Melen
Alex Melen co-founded SmartSites in 2011 with his brother Michael and leads the agency's automotive practice, which works with more than 90 dealerships. He founded the web host T35 Hosting at 13 and was named to BusinessWeek's Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 and Auto Remarketing's 40 Under 40. He has spoken at NADA, Digital Dealer, DrivingSales and NIADA on dealership search, paid advertising and AI search.

About SmartSites
SmartSites is a Paramus, New Jersey digital marketing agency founded in 2011 by brothers Alex and Michael Melen. The agency builds websites and runs SEO, paid search, social, email and AI-search programs for businesses across the United States, has been named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for ten consecutive years, and holds a 4.9-star rating across more than 900 Google reviews. Its automotive practice, led by Melen, provides car dealership SEO, paid search and AI-visibility programs.

Sam Chadson Ng
SmartSites
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