CarGurus Dealer Reviews and Ratings: What Dealers Should Know

CarGurus dealer reviews are star ratings and written feedback that shoppers leave on a dealer's CarGurus profile after a sales or service interaction, shown alongside that dealer's inventory listings. A strong CarGurus dealer rating affects how prominently your listings surface and how much a shopper trusts your price before ever calling or visiting, which makes it one of the few review platforms that sits directly inside the shopping funnel rather than off to the side of it. Dealers juggling Google, DealerRater and Cars.com often treat CarGurus as an afterthought, but shoppers who see CarGurus dealer reviews next to Google are usually comparing your rating directly against the dealership two listings down, in the same scroll, at the moment they're deciding which one to click. A gap there costs you a lead before your sales team ever gets a chance. How CarGurus dealer reviews work CarGurus lets verified visitors — people who've contacted a dealer or viewed a listing through the platform — leave a star rating and written review tied to that dealer's profile. Reviews can mention sales or service experiences, and most dealers accumulate far more sales reviews simply because more shoppers interact with CarGurus while car-shopping than while scheduling service. The review and your overall rating sit directly on your dealer profile page, which every shopper lands on before clicking through to a specific vehicle. Unlike some platforms, CarGurus reviews stay attached to the dealer, not the individual listing, so a bad experience on one vehicle sale affects how every current listing from that dealer reads to a shopper scrolling the results page. That also means a dealer with a large, diverse inventory can't isolate a reputation problem to just the "problem car" — the whole lot carries the same rating. Your overall star average on CarGurus also typically appears next to search results, meaning a shopper filtering by price or distance sees your rating before they've even clicked into a specific listing to read a single review. That earlier exposure point is part of why a mediocre rating can quietly suppress click-through even on a well-priced vehicle — the shopper never gets far enough to see the price justify itself. CarGurus dealer rating vs. deal rating It's easy to confuse two different numbers CarGurus shows: your dealer rating, which comes from customer reviews, and the deal rating badge (like "Great Deal" or "Good Deal") that CarGurus assigns to a specific listing based on its own pricing analysis compared to similar vehicles in the market. A dealer can have a strong review rating and still show listings tagged with a less favorable deal rating if the asking price is above what CarGurus's algorithm expects for that market — the two signals are independent, and shoppers read both before contacting you. Pricing your inventory competitively affects the deal rating; nothing about your review responses or request process changes it. Conflating the two in your team's head leads to the wrong fix — a sales manager chasing better reviews when the actual problem is a handful of overpriced listings dragging down deal ratings fleet-wide. Watch both numbers separately in your regular reporting. A dealership can look consistent at a glance — same star rating, same volume of new reviews — while a pricing strategy change quietly tanks deal ratings across half the lot, and that distinction only becomes visible if someone is tracking the two metrics apart rather than treating "CarGurus performance" as one blended number. Who can leave a CarGurus review CarGurus generally ties reviews to some form of verified interaction with the dealer through the platform, rather than allowing anonymous reviews from anyone . That verification step is part of why CarGurus reviews tend to carry a bit more shopper trust than a platform with no verification barrier at all — it's harder for a review to come from someone who was never actually a customer or prospect. How to get more CarGurus reviews The mechanics are the same ones that work everywhere else: ask every customer, the same way, every time, regardless of whether the deal felt smooth or the shopper walked away after negotiating hard. Skipping customers you suspect might leave a lukewarm review — gating — is exactly the kind of selective solicitation the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) targets, along with any discount or incentive tied to leaving one. Our guide on why review gating is a legal risk covers the mechanics of that rule in more depth. Timing matters: a request sent right after delivery, while the excitement of a new car is still fresh, consistently outperforms one sent a week later buried in a follow-up email nobody opens. Since CarGurus reviews are tied to platform interactions, make sure your sales process actually routes shoppers through CarGurus contact forms or listing views where relevant, rather than only through phone calls that CarGurus has no record of. Train sales staff to mention CarGurus specifically in the delivery-day review ask, rather than assuming a general "please review us" request will naturally cover every platform a shopper might be active on. A shopper who found your listing through CarGurus but closed the deal by phone may not think to go back to CarGurus to leave a review unless asked specifically — a generic request tends to default to whichever platform is top of mind, usually Google. If your dealership is also dealing with DealerRater — and most dealers with a CarGurus presence are — our guide to DealerRater reviews covers the sales-side platform shoppers check most often alongside CarGurus, including how to keep your reply tone consistent across both. CarGurus reviews for multi-location dealer groups A dealer group running several rooftops ends up with a separate CarGurus profile, and a separate dealer rating, for each location — which means a strong rating at your flagship store doesn't carry over to a newer or smaller location that hasn't built up the same review volume yet. Treating "our CarGurus performance" as one number for the whole group hides exactly the kind of location-level gap that needs its own fix. The same centralization problem shows up here as on Google and DealerRater: without a shared view across locations, a regional manager has no easy way to notice that one store's CarGurus rating has quietly drifted while the others held steady. Pulling every location's CarGurus reviews into the same inbox used for Google, DealerRater and Cars.com reviews keeps response time and tone consistent across the group, rather than depending on which store's manager happens to check CarGurus that week. Can dealers respond to CarGurus reviews? Yes, dealers with a claimed profile can post public replies. Keep the reply factual, avoid restating deal terms, financing details or the customer's personal information, and stay professional even when a review feels unfair — the same rules that apply to Google and DealerRater replies apply here. Does a bad CarGurus review get removed if it's unfair? CarGurus has its own dispute process for reviews that clearly violate its content policy, such as one from someone who never actually interacted with your dealership, but a review simply being unflattering isn't grounds for removal . Responding well in public is almost always more effective than pursuing removal. Does a low deal rating hurt my CarGurus star rating? No — the two are calculated independently. A listing's deal rating comes from CarGurus's own pricing analysis, while your star rating comes entirely from customer reviews. Fixing one doesn't automatically fix the other, so a dealer seeing weak performance on CarGurus needs to diagnose which of the two metrics is actually the problem before changing strategy. Does Tailwind pull CarGurus reviews into one inbox with Google and DealerRater? Whether CarGurus reviews can be imported automatically depends on CarGurus's current API access for third-party tools, and we can't confirm that across every dealer account . Where an automatic pull isn't available, monitoring CarGurus manually and logging new reviews into the same response workflow you use elsewhere keeps your process consistent even without automated import. Every review from Google, Yelp, DealerRater, Cars.com and CarGurus in one inbox → Try Tailwind free. Tailwind runs $5 a month per tool, or $50 a month for the Full plan covering every tool, with the first month free and no card required to start.