8:37 am, November 12, 2026
The autumn/winter edition of Mediahawk’s Automotive trends report shows demand holding steady, with dealers seeing a modest increase of 6% in both calls and website visitors compared to last year.
Our latest data also reflects how the car buyer journey is evolving. Dealers saw significant spikes in website visitors in January (+24% on the September 2025 baseline) and July (+11%), with calls peaking a couple of months later as plate changes arrived.
The data illustrates something dealers are seeing every day. Buyers are researching for longer, often using AI tools, and when they contact dealerships, they’re much closer to making a purchase decision.
At many dealerships, the visitors who browsed but didn’t immediately convert might have been written off. But those early research visits can be an important touchpoint on today’s longer, more complex buying journeys.
To support sales growth as buyer behaviour continues to evolve, dealers need to do three things:
1. Monitor outcomes, not just volumes
Although call volumes increased slightly year-on-year, quality beats quantity every time. Automotive marketers are focusing less on driving up volumes and more on increasing the value of the outcomes of those calls.
At the simplest level, that means tracking how many calls are missed, and when, so you can optimise staffing to handle peaks in enquiries.
But at a deeper level, it involves monitoring the content and outcomes of calls to identify what leads to test drives and sales. Then you can coach your teams to spot high-intent leads and convert more of them into revenue.
2. Understand the true sources of the calls that lead to sales
Although Google Business Profile generates about half of calls to dealerships, around a third of calls come through dealers’ websites.
When dealers only use static phone numbers, it’s impossible to attribute website calls to their actual source – the channel, campaign, keyword, or page that generated the enquiry. So marketing spend is directed based on gut feel rather than real knowledge.
Dealerships that use dynamic tracking numbers on their website have a clear advantage. They can see the source of every call, and by matching those calls to sales, they get a full picture of where their spend is delivering the right leads.
With insights like these, you can do more of what works and take a data-driven approach to increasing the return on your marketing investments.
3. Stay competitive in AI search
A key sign of the rise of AI search tools is that direct traffic (visitors who arrive without a trackable source) accounts for 32% of website visits, while organic search (visitors who click on an unpaid link) is down at 16%.
Buyers are increasingly using AI overviews and AI assistants to research potential purchases without clicking on anything. Dealership marketers are catching on to this quickly, though, and are now creating content such as FAQs that AI search tools will see and quote to users.
The other side of the AI search coin is that prospects are arriving readier to buy. Dealers need to assess whether their sales process can flex to suit people who have done all their research and are about to make a purchase decision.
Explore the full report
To see everything our latest data reveals about the state of the UK automotive market – and get practical tips for improving your dealership’s marketing performance – download a copy of the Mediahawk Automotive trends report: Autumn/Winter 2026.