Ford Dealers Ranked Above Average In 2025 Internet Lead Effectiveness Index

Each year, the Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Study measures a dealer’s responsiveness to those types of customer queries coming through dealership websites, which it considers a key requirement for retail success in today’s world. In that regard, Ford dealers fared rather poorly in the 2022 ILE, beating out only Fiat and ranking near the very bottom of the pack. In 2023, Ford dealers did improve in a big way, moving up 10 spots and tying the overall industry average. In the latest ILE Study, Ford dealers improved upon those results yet again, too.

In the 2025 version of the Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Study, Ford dealers improved on their score of 62 in last year’s study, finishing with a score of 66 – which tied the brand with Nissan, Mini, and Audi, while raking The Blue Oval just above the industry average of 65 – the latter of which representing a three point improvement versus 2024. After posting scores of 48 in 2021 and 2022, Ford dealers have now improved on this study for three consecutive years now.

To gather this data, Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through the websites of 4,023 automotive dealerships representing all major brands, each asking a specific question about a vehicle in dealer inventory with a customer name, email address, and phone number. From there, Pied Piper evaluated the speed and quality of dealership responses by email, telephone, text message, and chat over the next 24 hours.

The 2025 ILE study scores were derived using 20 differently weighted measurements, based upon best practices that are mathematically most likely to generate sales, which combine to generate an overall ILE score ranging from 0 to 100. Overall, dealers continue to improve in terms of responsiveness to online inquiries, though there is certainly still room for growth.

“The effort to improve is worth it. Historically, dealers who improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average sell 50 percent more units from the same quantity of internet leads,” said Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s Vice President of Metrics and Analytics. “We all agree that customers today visit dealer websites first, and how dealers respond to those customers drives today’s sales success,” said O’Hagan. “The trouble is that website customers can be invisible in day-to-day operations which makes them too easy to overlook.”