Electric Cars,
according to AI

Every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions real UK consumers ask about electric cars — and record exactly which brands they put forward. Right now, Tesla owns the conversation.

0 AI answers this run · 0 brands named · measured, never estimated

Tesla is the default answer.

Named in 40% of electric cars answers, typically in position 1.5. Hyundai follows at 25%, Kia at 25%.

Every brand AI names, ranked.

Visibility is the share of answers naming the brand; citation share is its slice of all brand-owned pages cited; read→cited is how often its pages convert a read into a citation.

Electric Cars is decided on attachment.

Being named is visibility. Underneath it, every answer describes a brand in three ways — how much it stands out, how much it belongs, and how much it is returned to. In electric cars, Tesla leads attachment at 117 against BMW at 80, indexed on the category at 100.

Each whorl lights one ring per index threshold cleared. See the full electric cars desire edition →

Before it answers, it goes looking for Tesla.

An assistant does not answer from memory alone. It runs its own web searches first, and whoever it searches for is the shortlist it then chooses from. Across 84 searches in electric cars, Tesla is named in 46% of the ones that name a brand at all. ChatGPT Web, Copilot do not report their searches, so these shares are measured against the ones that do.

These are the assistants' own searches, read from their answers — not what anyone typed into a search engine.

The referees of electric cars.

The independent sources AI models cite when answering electric cars questions — the places a brand needs to be seen, reviewed and ranked.

Tesla converts reads into citations. Hyundai doesn't.

When Claude or ChatGPT opens a brand's own pages while answering, does the page make the cited-sources list? Tesla converts 39% of reads; Hyundai just 24%. That gap is a content problem, not a visibility problem.

All three models agree: Tesla.

A rare consensus — every model puts Tesla first, and their top-five lists overlap 67%. Winning here means winning everywhere at once.

Brands whose visibility swings most between models — the bar per model, widest gap on the right.

Editorial carry electric cars.

Every page AI opened while answering, classified by what kind of page it is. Editorial supply the most citations; How-to guides convert best — 93% of the ones models opened were actually cited.

Specifications is what separates cited from ignored.

Of the electric cars pages models actually opened, how much more often each feature's pages ended up in the cited sources. Specifications is worth 8 percentage points; cites its sources pages fare 15pp worse. Measured within the read population, so selection can't flatter it.

Mercedes-Benz builds pages AI can quote.

Readiness scores each brand's own pages on the structure models reward — a direct answer up front, tables, hard numbers, named authors, structured data, recency, specifications. Porsche is the widest gap: well-built pages that still aren't converting into citations.

Readiness is the share of eight measurable structural signals present on a brand's profiled pages. It is a build-quality measure, not a ranking of the brand.

The questions electric cars pages have to settle.

Read straight off the pages AI cited: the consumer questions cited content answers most often. Content that fails to settle these is content models have no reason to quote.

Nineteen more categories.

Method: 20 unbranded consumer prompts per category, spread across the buying journey, run weekly against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Read→cited uses Claude and ChatGPT only (Gemini does not separate the two). Correlational observations of model behaviour at the time of the run. Data from the run completed Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:00:49 GMT.