Why Tyre Retailers Risk Disappearing From Search

Introduction · Page 04

About UpShift

Part of the wider Evolved group, UpShift is a specialised search agency that focuses on building long-term partnerships with businesses in the automotive sector.

With a proven track record of success, UpShift has helped a variety of companies across many sub-sectors in the automotive industry, and has built long-term partnerships with specialist and global brands.

At a Glance · Page 05

Why AI is Impacting Tyre Retailers Specifically

Similar websites. Similar promises – fully fitted pricing, fast turnaround, a straightforward booking flow. Similar messaging, often word for word. Across the national chains, the competition has narrowed down to just two things: price, and convenience.

That’s not a failure of any one business – it’s what happens when an entire category converges on the same playbook at the same time. Yesterday’s differentiator becomes today’s baseline, and once everyone offers next-day fitting and competitive pricing, none of it separates anyone anymore.

It was a survivable problem when the customer was the one doing the comparing – a person can still scroll past ten near-identical options and pick one anyway. AI doesn’t scroll. It picks one, and it can only justify picking a business it can actually tell apart from the rest. A retailer whose site, promise and pricing are indistinguishable from its closest competitor gives AI nothing to choose it for – so increasingly, it doesn’t.

Industry-Wide Visibility · Page 08

This sector has only three AI winners, and they’re consistently named together.

This table shows exactly how AI visibility is distributed across all retailers we have analysed in this sector – who holds it, and by how much.

Ask AI about tyres and it names the same three brands back, together, in the same answer: Blackcircles, Halfords and Kwik Fit. Almost nobody else makes it into the conversation at all.

Blackcircles leads with the strongest language (“safest choice,” “best overall”), Halfords follows as the recognisable brand, and Kwik Fit closes the trio specifically because of its nationwide physical coverage – a reason AI states directly, not just infers.

Between them, they are the default answer to “where do I buy tyres” in this sector. Not necessarily because they’re different from the other retailers in this industry – they’re just larger, more household names with a bigger brand.

Everyone else is competing for what’s left over, with nothing to separate them – it’s a lottery. AI has nothing to base a recommendation on beyond price or whatever’s said loudest.

Page 11

AI Concentrates Visibility More Than Google – And Around Different Winners

Google still spreads a meaningful share of visibility across a real number of businesses.

AI hands almost nine-tenths of everything to just three – and they’re not even the same three businesses Google favours.

Page 14

The Opportunity for Retailers to be Visible Has Reduced

Compared with traditional Google Search, AI gives tyre retailers fewer opportunities to be visible across the buying journey.

In Google, retailers can appear while customers research their options, compare manufacturers and decide where to buy. Within AI, retailer visibility is concentrated much later.

A retailer can rank in Google for searches such as “best Michelin tyres” or “Pirelli vs Continental”, putting its guides, category pages and products in front of customers while they are still deciding what to choose.

In AI responses, that influence shifts towards manufacturers. When a question relates to a particular manufacturer, its products or their features, AI is more likely to treat the manufacturer’s own website as the primary source of truth than rely on information provided by a retailer. This is reflected in our analysis: manufacturers account for 71% of visibility at the Consideration stage, compared with just 24% for retailers.

Retailers only become dominant once the product choice has largely been made. Their visibility rises to 98% at Decision and 79% at Transaction, as the customer moves from deciding what to buy to deciding where to buy it.

Methodology · Page 16

Why We Built UnderAi

We set out to use an AI visibility platform, not build one. But the tools we tested often reduced complex customer journeys to a single score, with little clarity around how it was calculated or what businesses should do next.

The Market Shift · Page 19

The Search Landscape Has Changed

For the past two decades, ranking well on Google meant customers found you, clicked through, and you had the chance to win their business.

That relationship is breaking down.

Google is increasingly designed to keep people on Google. AI Overviews now answer many buyer questions on the results page – the customer gets what they need without ever visiting a website.

At the same time, buyers are starting their research somewhere else entirely. A growing share of product and brand research now happens inside AI tools – before a customer ever reaches a traditional search results page, if they reach one at all.

Page 20

Why Tyre Retailers Are Especially Exposed

Fewer chances to be seen, and a category where every business looks the same – that’s a worse combination for tyre retailers than for most sectors.

A business that resells the same products as competitors, at similar prices, with no clear point of view – or with a point of view nobody has aimed at a specific customer, in language that customer actually understands – gives an AI system nothing to recommend it for. It doesn’t matter how well-optimised the website is – if there’s no real, specific answer to ‘why this one, not the others, for someone like me,’ AI has no reason to choose them either.

This is why the businesses most exposed right now aren’t the ones doing SEO badly. They’re the ones who never needed a genuine point of differentiation in the first place – because until now, ranking well was enough. It isn’t anymore.

The Market Shift · Page 21

How AI is Collapsing the Tyre-Buying Journey

It’s not just that AI recommends brands instead of ranking pages. For a growing number of buyers, AI is replacing the research journey itself.

Give an AI assistant a registration plate and it can identify the exact vehicle and return a specific recommendation in one exchange – no tyre size lookup, no fitment chart, sometimes not even a question if the AI already knows the car from an earlier conversation. What used to mean searching “[car model] tyre size” and opening three tabs to compare retailers can now happen in a single conversation, moving a buyer from need to recommendation before they ever encounter a retailer.

It doesn’t stop at answering, either. Ask about tyres for a specific car and the natural next step is for AI to request a registration plate or postcode to “get more specific” – each answer steers the buyer further down one path. A traditional search puts a page of results in front of someone who chooses what to click; a conversational exchange puts one question in front of them, and their answer decides what gets surfaced next. Other retailers they might once have found through search may never be shown at all.

Why it can’t wait · Page 23

The Marketing Reality

When price is the only thing left to compete on, the result is a race to the bottom.

Every discount gets matched, every competitor bids the same keywords, and the business that lasts longest isn’t the best one, it’s whoever can survive on the thinnest margin.

Page 24

The Opportunity Is Real – But It Won’t Wait

In a category everyone needs and nobody thinks about, the business that becomes the obvious answer to “who do I use for this” gets asked the question for years.

That’s what makes the position worth more than the sale it wins today. A competitor can match the price, copy the messaging, even build a better website – and it won’t matter, because the customer was never comparing in the first place. Being the obvious answer removes a business from the competition altogether. It’s no longer one option being weighed against others. It’s just what someone does, the same way they’d always done it.

There aren’t countless ways to be that answer, either. In a category this narrow, the genuine positions to hold are few. Every one already claimed is one fewer left for whoever comes next.

The Upside · Page 26

The Real Way to Future-Proof Your Marketing

Search algorithms change. AI models change even faster. What ranks well today may not rank at all in twelve months, and no one – including the platforms themselves – fully knows what the next shift will reward.

Chasing each new algorithm update is a losing game if the underlying business has nothing distinct to offer once the update lands.

The Upside · Page 27

In other words: visibility is rented, differentiation is owned.

If a brand is trusted for a specific type of expertise, service, or a specific point of view – and says so in words that customer recognises as being about them – that advantage doesn’t depend on any one platform’s rules.

It shows up in reviews, in word of mouth, in repeat business, and – increasingly – in whether AI tools have a genuine reason to recommend that brand by name, to the right person, rather than defaulting to whichever generic result is easiest to summarise.

This plays out commercially, not just strategically:

The Upside · Page 28

Differentiation Creates Another Route into the Answer

AI answers often organise recommendations around the different options a customer might need.

When several businesses offer the same proposition, AI has little reason to name all of them. It may select one or two representative brands, leaving the rest competing for the same crowded position.

Genuine differentiation creates another route into the answer.

Who We Are · Page 29

Who We Are

Most agencies sell more of what already isn’t working – more content, more digital pr campaigns, more spend on the same channels everyone else is bidding on.

We do the opposite. We find the specific reason a business deserves to be chosen, build it, and make sure it’s the thing AI and Google actually see.

About UnderAi · Page 30

About UnderAi

UnderAi is the research platform behind this report. It was built to answer a simple question: when real customers ask AI for advice, which brands are actually visible – and why?

It doesn’t track rankings or generic visibility scores. It measures what real personas actually get told – which brands come up, how prominently, and in what context – using real buyer questions, not hypothetical ones.

Next Steps · Page 31

Next Steps

This report is a starting point.

The next step is a call to run through the full report together – what we found, what it means for you specifically, and what a genuine, defensible point of differentiation could look like from here.