New on Overfuel: Structured vehicle listings for Google Search

Alex Griffis October 23, 2023

On October 16, Google announced support for structured data enabling dealerships to show their in-stock inventory on Google Search. If you’re not sure why this is such great news, let us break it down.

First, let’s talk about Google Vehicle Listing Ads (VLAs). VLAs are used to promote new or used inventory on Google search, including:

Your dealership’s name and location
Year, make, model, trim
Photos of the vehicle
The vehicle’s mileage and proximity to the end-user

VLAs historically required dealerships to set up and maintain inventory feeds manually. If a dealership was lucky, their website vendor set this up on their behalf.

With this announcement from Google, car dealerships of all sizes are eligible to promote their vehicle listings on Google Search, and it’s available out of the box with Overfuel’s AI-enhanced websites. We’ve implemented the structured data across all of our dealerships’ inventory as of today.

Much like our ChatGPT integration, it’s all automated, so dealers don’t have to lift a finger, and it’s another way we’re optimizing dealerships for local search.

Benefits of vehicle ads and structured data for car dealers

Classified ads traditionally dominate local search.
Websites like AutoTrader and CarGurus have long dominated the search engines. As an alternative, structured vehicle listings enable dealerships to display relevant inventory directly within Google Search results.
Structured vehicle listings are visual ads for local buyers.
Once your listings are live, your inventory is displayed on local search to attract new customers.
Vehicle ads are cost-effective.
Some dealerships report better engagement and lower costs than traditional pay-per-click or paid social ads.
The listing process is automated.
Overfuel automatically sets up vehicle listings on behalf of dealerships, so there’s no need to manually set up an inventory feed. Once our vehicle listings are live, they’re automatically updated if a dealership changes the vehicle.

Find out if your dealership website supports vehicle listings

If you’re not sure if your dealership website supports vehicle ads, here’s how you can find out:

Go to the Rich Results Test by Google Search Console.
Paste in the URL to one of your vehicles.
Ensure your results detected a vehicle listing, which should include the year, make, and model, as well as the price, photos, and other key information (screenshot below)