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Market decline YoY
Dealer domain growth
Top brand average
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The UK's No.1 Car Dealerships Industry Report
Search visibility across UK car dealership brands fell 13.0% between July 2025 and July 2026. That is the brand-level average published in the report. A second calculation lands in the same place: pooled monthly visibility across the top 100 domains dropped from 35,379,209 to 30,764,217, a loss of 4,614,992 visits, or 13.04%. Two methods built differently producing the same answer is reasonable evidence that this is a genuine market movement and not an artefact of how an average was weighted.
Several of the largest movements in the dataset reflect an ownership or migration decision rather than search performance, so they are excluded from every conclusion in this report. Motors.co.uk fell 91.38% and lost 1,558,226 visits, dropping from rank 5 to rank 26, while cazoo.co.uk rose 198.53% and gained 583,180 visits, climbing from rank 18 to rank 6 — two domains under common ownership moving in opposite directions at a similar scale after Motors bought the Cazoo brand and relaunched it as the flagship of its marketplace network. Saxton4x4.co.uk fell to 2 visits while saxtons.co.uk went from zero to 20,611, which is a domain migration. Bristolstreet.co.uk fell to 31 visits as Vertu Motors retired the Bristol Street name and consolidated traffic onto vertumotors.com.
The decline survives every exclusion we can reasonably make, and it happened while the number of cars changing hands held up — the SMMT recorded 4,025,550 used car transactions in the first half of 2026, up 0.2% year-on-year.
| Pooled top-100 visibility | Jul 2025 | Jul 2026 | YoY change |
|---|---|---|---|
| All 100 domains | 35,379,209 | 30,764,217 | -13.04% |
| Excluding motors.co.uk | 33,673,975 | 30,617,209 | -9.08% |
| Excluding motors.co.uk and cazoo.co.uk | 33,380,224 | 29,740,278 | -10.90% |
Twelve domains in the top 100 hold no physical stock: autotrader.co.uk, theaa.com, rac.co.uk, carwow.co.uk, motability.co.uk, parkers.co.uk, pistonheads.com, cargurus.co.uk, exchangeandmart.co.uk, heycar.com, buyacar.co.uk and uk-car-discount.co.uk. All twelve lost visibility. Pooled, they fell from 24,472,567 to 21,019,033, down 3,453,534 visits or 14.11%, with a brand-level mean of -35.01%. Those 3,453,534 lost visits are 74.83% of the sector’s entire 4,614,992 decline. Add flagged motors.co.uk and the count is 13 of 13 negative.
Twelve domains all moving the same way with no exceptions points to something changing at SERP level rather than twelve separate content or technical problems. The queries these sites were built around — “used cars for sale”, “car valuation”, model-level review and comparison terms, part-exchange questions — are the query types where Google now answers on the results page itself through an AI Overview, an expanded knowledge panel or Vehicle Listing rich results. Google switched AI Mode on in the UK on 28 July 2025, the first month of this comparison window. Bauer’s global audience director Stuart Forrest described the specifications problem plainly: Parkers publishes data across tens of thousands of makes, models and derivatives that Bauer licenses in from third parties, and more than 60% of Bauer’s website traffic arrives through organic search. parkers.co.uk fell 39.02%.
Commercial condition explains part of the table too. Volkswagen Financial Services wound heycar down in Great Britain during 2025 and heycar.com fell 57.87%. BuyaCar stopped selling used cars in 2022 and moved to lead generation, and buyacar.co.uk is now the largest rank faller in the index, down 47 places.
| Domain | What it does | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| autotrader.co.uk | National used-car marketplace | -8.43% |
| pistonheads.com | Enthusiast editorial and classifieds | -29.78% |
| parkers.co.uk | Reviews, specifications and valuations | -39.02% |
| cargurus.co.uk | Listings aggregator with price analysis | -54.87% |
| heycar.com | Curated used-car marketplace | -57.87% |
| buyacar.co.uk | Used-car lead generation and finance | -81.25% |
| 12 non-stockholding domains, pooled | 24,472,567 to 21,019,033 | -14.11% |
Sixty-four franchised and physical dealer groups appear in the top 100 with their own domains. Together they grew from 5,968,526 to 6,261,837, up 293,311 visits or 4.91% pooled, while the market fell 13.04% — a spread of 17.95 percentage points between the two groups. Thirty-four of the sixty-four grew, 53.13% of the bloc, against 43.43% of the top 100 as a whole.
Aggregate growth of that kind often traces back to one or two spectacular outliers, so it needs testing. Parks UK grew 243.54%; remove it and the dealer bloc still grows 1.72%. Remove Parks UK, Sandown Group (up 180.91% from a base of 5,532 visits) and Motorvogue (up 158.63% from 9,124) and the bloc still grows 1.31%.
What the biggest gainers have in common is buildings and franchise agreements. john-clark.co.uk grew 50.66% and added 69,816 visits while John Clark Motor Group took on Kia and BYD, spent £12m redeveloping its Škoda, SEAT and Cupra site on Craigshaw Road, and picked up the Volkswagen businesses at Dundee and St Andrews. Every franchise addition puts a manufacturer section, a new-model range and a used-stock filter onto a domain that previously had no reason to rank for those model names. easternwestern.co.uk grew 54.22% after buying Edinburgh Audi and Stirling Audi from Lookers. carsa.co.uk grew 94.02% and climbed 22 rank places after taking four former Bravoauto showrooms.
John Clark takes the top position in this year’s index and Marshall recorded the largest absolute increase in visibility of any brand in the dataset. Share of top-100 visibility moved with the traffic: the franchised dealer bloc went from 16.87% to 20.35%, a gain of 3.48 percentage points.
| Segment | Jul 2025 | Jul 2026 | Change | Share of sector decline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 non-stockholding domains | 24,472,567 | 21,019,033 | -14.11% | 74.83% |
| 64 franchised dealer own domains | 5,968,526 | 6,261,837 | +4.91% | — |
| Top 100, all domains | 35,379,209 | 30,764,217 | -13.04% | 100% |
Brand Reach Score measures how much branded search a domain attracts, so it works as a proxy for how well known a brand is to UK car buyers. Sorting this year’s performance by that score produces a gradient running against brand size. Ranks 1 to 30, excluding the two flagged consolidation domains, averaged -16.44% year-on-year across 28 brands. Ranks 31 to 50, excluding the spiky Parks UK, averaged +19.34% across 19 brands, a swing of 35.78 percentage points.
Seventeen of the eighteen largest brands by reach declined. fiat.co.uk, up 5.60%, is the single exception, and it opened UK order books for the Grande Panda in September 2025 at £18,035 as a hybrid and £21,835 as an EV. The largest branded-search assets in this sector belong to the marketplaces and motoring organisations, and those are the domains whose non-branded query base — valuations, comparisons, “cars for sale near me” — has moved onto the SERP itself. A strong brand keeps its branded search arriving. It does not hold the generic and long-tail model queries that used to sit underneath it, which is where the volume went.
Branded demand on its own protects nobody. bigmotoringworld.co.uk has 450,000 monthly brand searches and 13th place for Brand Reach, and fell 31.76%. autotrader.co.uk holds 6,120,000 monthly brand searches, eleven times the next largest domain in this index, and still lost 1,129,067 visits at -8.43%.
The mid-table brands growing at +27.38% and +10.39% are mostly dealer groups winning narrower searches: a model plus a town, a stock query for a particular derivative, a service or MOT search tied to a location.
| Brand Reach Score band | Average YoY change |
|---|---|
| BRS 1-10 | -17.29% |
| BRS 11-20 | -21.04% |
| BRS 21-30 | -11.52% |
| BRS 31-40 | +27.38% |
| BRS 41-50 | +10.39% |
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