Cars.com, the U.S. No. 2 autos site, says the AI-powered search capabilities it adopted earlier this year have boosted selection rates and now account for close to a fifth of internet leads submitted.
“We unveiled new consumer AI features in the spring and early summer that are ramping quickly, contributing to differentiation and driving our marketplace flywheel,” Alex Vetter, president, CEO and director of Cars.com, told investors in the company’s Q2 2025 earnings call.
He noted the marketplace’s “continuous AI innovation and new enhancements we’ll be launching for our customers later this year.”
Vetter said Cars.com — which is owned by Cars Commerce — sees AI as “a critical tool to drive lead volume and quality.”
“Consumers browsing Cars.com are benefiting from a major update in the form of our new AI-powered search capabilities,” he added.
In May, the company began augmenting standard keyword searches with natural language recognition, converting conversational queries like ‘new SUVs under 35,000’ into tailored shopping results.
“It’s still early days, but lead selection rates from visitors using AI search are already two times higher than regular search and account for nearly 20% of Internet leads submitted,” said the CEO.
“The feature is prominent on top of our homepage, and we encourage everyone to try it out for a more enhanced car-buying experience.”
The autos marketplace also intends to marry its AI offering with its vast content, noted Vetter.
“We have immediate plans to integrate editorial content into the search experience for the personalized results and comparisons and enable completion of leads, submissions and trade-in value requests using AI,” he said. “We’re committed to developing and implementing ways to leverage AI to drive performance and open up new growth vectors.”
The CEO added that the company’s “extensive content library complements the rising use of AI agents, who rely on our expertise and heavily reference our content and brand… We’re layering [our content] into as many of the AI engines that we can, which is rendering our brand recognition and serving as a real halo for our authority.”
The AIM Group has contacted Vetter to ask for more specifics on Cars.com’s AI enhancements and will update this article if we receive a response.
The site’s AI efforts are in line with those of its rivals.
In June, CarGurus, the No. 1 visited autos site in the U.S., released a conversation search experience based on OpenAI’s generative AI.
The new interface provides “a more personalized and intuitive car shopping experience,” the company announced at the time.
Available on desktop and mobile, it was introduced as an optional way to search for cars; on desktop, users can find it by clicking the “discover” tab at the top of CarGurus’s homepage. Structured search remains the default.
Cars Commerce posted a decline in profit and flat revenue in Q2 2025, with growth in car-maker ad sales offsetting a slight year-on-year dip in the company’s core dealership business.
Revenue fell just shy of $179 million, virtually unchanged from both the previous quarter and the year-ago quarter. Net income came to $7 million, down 38% year on year (y-o-y).
The company counted 19,412 dealer customers at the end of June, up more than 160 from the previous quarter, the biggest sequential increase Cars had enjoyed in three years. However, monthly average revenue per dealer was down about 2% y-o-y to $2,435.
Cars.com was launched in June 1998. It was originally a division of Classified Ventures LLC, owned by major media companies including A.H. Belo, Gannett, The McClatchy Company, Tribune Company and The Washington Post Company.
Cars.com was spun off from Tegna, Inc. in 2017. In late 2023, the company rebranded its commercial offerings — including its core marketplace, software, and marketing products — as “Cars Commerce.”
