Gas prices have been on a tear since the war with Iran began in February. The national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline hit $4.56 on May 21, up $1.38 from a year prior and the highest Memorial Day weekend gas price in four years, according to AAA.
Unlike the price at the pump, the price at an electric vehicle charging station has been remarkably stable at about $0.41 per kilowatt hour. That means it would cost $104.88 to fill an empty tank for a Ford F-150, but only $53.71 to charge a dead battery for a Ford F-150 Lightning.
Gas prices’ rapid rise would seemingly spur drivers to rethink their combustion engines, but no rush to EVs has materialized so far. Prompts on large language models (LLMs) for “EV”, “electric vehicle” and “electric car” climbed a meager 6% since January, reaching 4.7 million monthly prompts in April, according to EverPanel data. That’s despite a 44% increase in gas prices over the same period.
Similarly, CarGurus noted in early April that views of EVs on their site have tracked closely with gas prices, but sales, not so much. Although more than 42,000 used EVs were sold in April, a 17% year-over-year gain, sales of new EVs fell 23%, according to Cox Automotive. That dip is due in part to high prices and in part to especially high sales of new vehicles in April 2025 when buyers were rushing to avoid new tariffs.
But if no relief for drivers’ wallets comes soon, things could change quickly. If they do, Hyundai, Tesla and Kia are poised to win buyers from AI search traffic.
Hyundai and Tesla Vie for Visibility on AI Search Models
At Evertune Research, we’ve been tracking prompts around the theme “electric cars for families” for months on the Evertune AI marketing platform to see how large language models (LLMs) talk about EV makers.
On average across 11 models, Tesla held its lead in the category with a stable AI Brand Score of about 89 over the last six months. AI Brand Score is the Evertune metric that considers both how often and how high brands appear in a meaningful sample of responses. The score ranges from 0 to 100.
In fact, the top five brands on average across all models combined remained unchanged December through May: Tesla, Hyundai, Kia, Ford and Volkswagen. But the consistency belies significant volatility within models. That volatility included Hyundai overtaking Tesla on ChatGPT.
The highest brand scores on ChatGPT also consolidated significantly on the top three brands (Hyundai, Tesla and Kia) in recent months, as newer ChatGPT model versions have become more consistent in recommending fewer brands for any given topic. The story was reversed on Perplexity, where Hyundai’s AI Brand Score sagged 6 points from December to May and Tesla’s surged 20 points.
It is important to note that in the probabilistic world of LLMs, prompt wording has a huge impact on the responses models generate. When we ran a separate experiment in April around Memorial Day sales categories, including EVs, we found that Tesla led the category on ChatGPT, with Hyundai the close 2nd.
This dichotomy could suggest that ChatGPT more closely associates Hyundai than Tesla with the “for families” element of this set of prompts. Knowing the types of prompts in which brands hold a lead and the types of prompts brands wish to target are key elements of any Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy.
Another likely culprit for the ascendance of Hyundai and Kia relative to Tesla is recent bad press for Tesla. The company retained the No. 1 AI Brand Score in May on ChatGPT and Gemini when those two models were restricted from making internet searches (forcing it to rely on months-old training knowledge), but it slipped to 2nd on ChatGPT and 3rd on Gemini when internet searches were incorporated in the models’ responses. It’s likely, then, that news of Tesla’s first ever annual revenue decline as well as recalls and lawsuits could be weighing on LLMs’ recommendations.
AI Brand Score:
A Category to Watch
Although high gas prices have yet to spur major buying interest from American drivers, that could well change if prices remain elevated through the summer, peak driving months. Should more drivers opt to swap combustion engines for electric motors, the stakes for AI visibility in the EV category go way up.
Hyundai and Tesla are already locked in battle for the top spot. Kia is growing its lead against brands outside of the top three. All other brands have some serious GEO work to do to become competitive.
Methodology
At Evertune Research, we track hundreds of brands across 250 categories. For this analysis, we ran more than 78,000 prompts monthly on the theme of “electric cars for families” across 11 models for the last six months. The models include ChatGPT consumer app (with search), ChatGPT foundational knowledge (without search), Claude foundational knowledge (without search), DeepSeek foundational knowledge (without search), Copilot consumer app (with search), Gemini consumer app (with search), Gemini foundational knowledge (without search), Google AI Mode consumer app (with search), Google AI Overview consumer app (with search), Meta AI foundational knowledge (without search), and Perplexity consumer app (with search).
Evertune is the AI marketing platform for brands that want to own the AI customer journey. Evertune analyzes prompt responses at scale across all major LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews and more, to deliver statistically significant visibility data, then closes the loop with tools to act on it: website optimization, data-driven content creation, most influential sources, and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Where most tools tell you where you stand, Evertune tells you what to do about it. Founded by early executives of The Trade Desk and backed by $20M from leading investors.
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