Case study · Car rental · Central & Eastern Europe
In seven months, SearchTides took Klass Wagen from a brand AI engines mostly knew by name to one they recommend when travelers ask where to rent a car in Central and Eastern Europe.
About Klass Wagen
Klass Wagen is a Romanian-owned mobility group that has been renting and selling cars since 2009. It runs an active fleet of 7,000 vehicles across 18 brands and 48 models, almost all of them 0 to 2 years old, with stations in Romania, Hungary, Portugal and, more recently, Germany and Austria (Forbes Romania).
Klass Wagen competes every day with Sixt, Europcar, Enterprise, Avis and Hertz, plus the brokers and comparison sites that sit between travelers and rental desks. CMO Remus Moraru saw early that travelers were no longer scrolling a list of rental companies. They were asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode which company to book, and taking the shortlist they were given.
In March 2026, Klass Wagen partnered with SearchTides on a seven-month AI visibility program to make sure it was on that shortlist.
TL;DR
| Headline figure | What it means | Source and window |
|---|---|---|
| 438% | Increase in bookings coming directly from AI platforms | Klass Wagen, Apr to Aug 2026 vs same period 2025 |
| 450% | Increase in sessions from AI platforms to klasswagen.com | Klass Wagen, Apr to Aug 2026 vs same period 2025 |
| ~3x | Conversion rate of AI search visitors vs a leading travel metasearch platform | Klass Wagen, 2026 |
| #7 → #3 | Non-branded AI share of voice, overtaking Avis, Enterprise, Hertz and Budget | Profound, Mar vs Sep 2026 |
| 42.4% → 54.9% | Non-branded AI visibility, while every major global competitor declined | Profound, Mar vs Sep 2026 |
| #5 → #2 | klasswagen.com among all domains AI engines cite in the category (#1 in August) | Profound, Mar vs Sep 2026 |
| 23,500+ | AI citations earned by 69 Superfeeder placements | Profound, Mar to Sep 2026 |
| +56% | Organic Google clicks, with branded clicks up 47% | Search Console, last 6 months vs prior 6 |
The problem
Klass Wagen was not invisible to AI. It was misunderstood. SearchTides' AI Undercurrent audit analyzed thousands of AI answers across eight platforms. Klass Wagen already appeared in 42% of non-branded answers, far above the sub-10% starting point typical for independent brands. Yet its overall AI Undercurrent score was just 2.2 out of 5.
The gap had nothing to do with service quality. It came from what AI could and could not verify.
FAQs, pricing and insurance details sat behind JavaScript accordions that most LLM crawlers can't render, so AI filled the gaps from forums and review sites.
29% of mentions framed Klass Wagen as "budget-friendly," pushing it into a race on price alone. Insurance and deposits dominated the conversation, appearing in 46% and 40% of mentions, often with negative framing pulled from Reddit.
Fleet size appeared as 5,000 on some pages and 7,000 on others. Conflicting facts make AI hedge ("Klass Wagen claims...") or hallucinate.
Outside Trustpilot, there was little third-party corroboration for what Klass Wagen said about itself.
"The gap isn't the quality of your service. It's just the information that's available to AI."
SearchTides, AI Undercurrent findings call, April 2026
The stakes were clear. When a traveler asks "best car rental companies in Europe," AI names a handful of brands. Those slots were going to Sixt, Europcar, Enterprise and Avis.
The approach
"We started from one question: where does the brand need to be at the moment the consumer starts making a decision, and what information does AI need to be able to verify in order to make the recommendation?"
Drew Schweppe, SearchTides CEO, in Forbes Romania
SearchTides diagnosed the gaps, wrote the standards and content plans, and placed Klass Wagen in third-party sources. Klass Wagen's team implemented the on-site changes, and SearchTides validated each one.
The first priority was the Data layer of the AI Undercurrent. The FAQ hub was rebuilt in crawlable HTML with FAQPage schema. Dedicated Pricing and Insurance pages replaced scattered, JavaScript-hidden answers. Site-wide H1, title and canonical fixes cleaned up crawl loops, including duplicate location pages.
"The biggest unlock is structured data." — Keegan Duffy, SearchTides Head of Operations
SearchTides wrote a Canonical Language Set and a list of Critical Claims, so every page, press release and listing stated the same brand facts: a 7,000+ vehicle fleet renewed annually, 20+ stations, unlimited mileage, free airport shuttles at most airport locations, and the advantages of booking direct. The fleet-size contradiction was resolved, and insurance terminology was harmonized so AI and customers read the same thing.
AI platforms need third parties to confirm what a brand says about itself. For discovery prompts like "best car rental companies in Europe," AI leans heavily on roundup articles. SearchTides' Superfeeder program placed Klass Wagen inside those articles: 10 insertions into pages AI already cited and 59 new inclusions across travel and news publishers.
The first placement was cited by AI just six days after it went live. An August citation pattern analysis then steered later posts toward the formats AI engines cite most.
Cross-border rental policy pages and five source-country travel corridor pages (Germany, Italy, France, Israel and Spain) answered the questions international travelers bring to AI. Every location page was rewritten, Google Business Profiles were optimized for all 20 stations, and vehicle category pages launched in September. A Romanian Wikipedia article went live in July.
Where sentiment was weakest, on insurance, deposits and damage, SearchTides built an LLM sentiment recovery plan: clear canonical explanations of each policy, distributed across Google Business Profiles, review responses, partner listings and community threads, backed by a managed Reddit program.
The results
Klass Wagen grew while the market leaders shrank. Between March and September, non-branded AI visibility rose 12.5 points to 54.9%. Avis, Europcar, Enterprise, Hertz, Sixt and Budget all lost visibility over the same period. Across all 219 tracked prompts, Klass Wagen ranks #1, 22 points ahead of the next brand.
| Metric (Profound) | March 2026 | September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Non-branded AI visibility | 42.4% | 54.9% |
| Non-branded share of voice | 5.0% (#7) | 6.9% (#3) |
| klasswagen.com citation share, all prompts | 3.0% (#5) | 8.3% (#2) |
| klasswagen.com citation share, non-branded | 1.4% (#15) | 3.0% (#4) |
klasswagen.com is now the second most-cited website in the category, behind only google.com, and overtook Trustpilot, Booking.com, Reddit, DiscoverCars and sixt.com as a source AI engines rely on.
March 2026 September 2026 AI visibility by topic, Profound
From missing to first in ChatGPT
In each of these real ChatGPT answers captured by Profound, Klass Wagen was missing in March and named first by late September.
Can I drive a rental car from Romania to Hungary?
0%→53%of answers
ChatGPT now cites Klass Wagen's cross-border rules page and quotes its exact fee, a direct result of the cross-border policy page and FAQ schema work.
Where can I find cheap car rental at Budapest Airport?
Average→100%of answers
ChatGPT draws the answer from comparison sites like KAYAK, which now list Klass Wagen alongside its Budapest Airport rates.
Which companies offer car rental at Bacau Airport?
Half→100%of answers
ChatGPT describes Klass Wagen as the established airport provider and gives its terminal-area address.
From visibility to bookings
Klass Wagen reports that bookings coming directly from AI platforms rose 438% from April to August 2026 versus the same months of 2025, and AI-referred sessions rose 450%.
According to Klass Wagen, travelers who come from AI search convert at roughly three times the rate of a leading travel metasearch platform that also sells its rentals. A traveler who asks AI for a recommendation has already done the comparing, and arrives ready to reserve.
"For us, the 438% growth in bookings attributed directly to this channel is a very strong signal that the investment in AI Visibility is starting to deliver commercial value, not just visibility."
Remus Moraru, CMO, Klass Wagen, in Forbes Romania
The AI gains carried through to Google. Over the last six months versus the previous six:
A new marketing channel
For Klass Wagen, AI visibility is no longer an extension of SEO. It is a growth channel and a customer touchpoint in its own right.
"Partnering with SearchTides has been a standout experience for us at Klass Wagen. Their team didn't just strengthen our existing SEO foundation. They opened an entirely new marketing channel by engineering our brand's visibility inside AI discovery systems like ChatGPT, Gemini and alike, a frontier most mobility brands haven't even begun to explore.
As a multi-market mobility company operating across 4 countries and serving customers from more than 40 countries, having a partner that innovates this far ahead gives us a genuine competitive advantage."
Looking ahead
"The consumer no longer just searches a list of companies. They ask directly which option is right for them, and AI gives them a shortlist. If you're not on that shortlist, you practically don't exist at that moment of discovery."
Remus Moraru, in Forbes Romania
The next phase takes the same approach into the languages of Klass Wagen's other markets: Romanian, Portuguese, Hungarian and German. Portugal is the clearest opportunity. Branded demand there is strong, but AI visibility is the lowest of Klass Wagen's main markets, which leaves room to win discovery prompts the way Klass Wagen already has in Romania and Hungary.
If you compete against household names and want AI to recommend you anyway, book a call with SearchTides.
Topic · AI commerce · part of the AI Visibility Engineering guide
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