DealerRater Reviews: How They Work and How Dealers Get More

DealerRater reviews are customer ratings and written feedback left on DealerRater.com, a dealer-review platform owned by Cars.com Inc. , covering both the sales and service sides of a dealership. Reviews often name a specific salesperson or service advisor, and DealerRater syndicates dealer ratings into Cars.com listings, which makes it one of the more visible review platforms for any dealership with a sales floor. If you run a dealership, there's a decent chance a customer has mentioned DealerRater to you without you having a clear system for it yet — maybe a sales manager checks it occasionally, or a service advisor gets tagged in a review nobody saw for two weeks. That's the common failure mode: DealerRater reviews pile up inconsistently across departments because sales and service rarely share the same review workflow, even though both feed the same public profile. Shops that manage DealerRater reviews with Google in one inbox tend to catch and respond to both sides faster than ones treating DealerRater as a separate, occasional chore. What DealerRater is and how it connects to Cars.com DealerRater lets customers rate and review dealerships by department — sales, service, and sometimes parts — and lets reviewers name the specific person they worked with. Because DealerRater is part of Cars.com Inc. , dealer ratings and review counts also show up alongside your inventory listings on Cars.com itself, which means your DealerRater rating isn't just sitting on a standalone review site — it's visible to the same shopper who's actively comparing your listed vehicles against a competitor's. That syndication is the main reason DealerRater carries more weight for dealerships than a typical niche review site does for other local businesses: a shopper doesn't have to go looking for your reviews separately, they see the rating right next to the car they're already considering. How dealers get more DealerRater reviews The mechanics are the same ones that work on Google: ask every customer, every time, the same way, regardless of whether the deal was smooth or the service visit was a frustrating one. A request sent after a vehicle delivery and a separate request sent after a service visit both make sense, since they're genuinely different experiences and different departments — but neither should be filtered based on how the interaction went. Skipping customers you suspect were unhappy is review gating, and it's the kind of practice the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) targets directly, along with offering any discount, service credit, or incentive tied to leaving a review. Our guide on why review gating is a legal risk covers this in more depth than is dealership-specific here. Timing follows the same logic as any other industry: ask close to the moment of relief or satisfaction — right after the delivery paperwork is signed, or right after the service invoice is paid and the keys are handed back — rather than days later. Our general guide on getting more reviews after every repair order covers the service-side mechanics in detail, and most of it transfers directly to a dealership's service department. DealerRater Certified Dealer and Consumer Satisfaction Award programs DealerRater has historically run recognition programs for dealers with strong review profiles, including a Certified Dealer designation and an annual Consumer Satisfaction Award . If your dealership qualifies for one of these, it's worth displaying the badge on your website and in your Google Business Profile description — but check DealerRater's current program rules directly before claiming a status that may have changed, rather than assuming last year's criteria still apply. When a review names a specific salesperson or service advisor DealerRater reviews frequently call out an individual by name, which raises the stakes on how you respond. For a positive review, thank the customer and let the praise stand — there's no need to add anything beyond a genuine acknowledgment. For a negative review naming an employee, the public reply should stay focused on the dealership's process, not the employee personally: avoid publicly agreeing that a specific person did something wrong, and avoid defending them by name either, since both turn a customer complaint into a conversation about an individual's job performance in a public, permanent place. Something like "we take feedback about every interaction seriously and our sales manager would like to follow up directly" keeps the reply professional without either throwing an employee under the bus or disputing the review in public. Internally, that's a different conversation — tracking which reviews mention which employee, positive or negative, is reasonable for coaching and recognition, as long as it stays internal and doesn't turn into publicly singling out staff in review replies. DealerRater reviews are not the same as your OEM's CSI survey Dealerships that sell a specific brand usually also run a manufacturer customer satisfaction survey (often shortened to CSI) tied to each sale or service visit. That survey is a separate, private feedback channel to the manufacturer — it is not the same thing as a public DealerRater or Google review, and treating them interchangeably causes two problems. First, many OEM dealer agreements explicitly prohibit "survey coaching" — telling a customer what score to give or how to answer — so staff trained to ask for a public review need to understand that the same ask doesn't apply to the manufacturer's survey. Second, a dealership focused entirely on CSI scores can end up neglecting its public review profile, even though the public profile is what an unrelated shopper actually sees before they ever become a customer. Keep the two asks, and the two sets of rules, clearly separate for your staff. Does Tailwind pull DealerRater reviews into one inbox? Whether DealerRater reviews can be pulled automatically into a unified inbox alongside Google, Yelp, and Cars.com depends on DealerRater's current API access and isn't something we can confirm across every account . Where a direct pull isn't available, monitoring DealerRater manually and logging new reviews into the same workflow you use for other platforms keeps your response process consistent even if the import itself isn't automated. Can I respond to a DealerRater review? Yes — dealership staff with an account on DealerRater can post public replies to reviews, the same way you would on Google. The same rules apply: stay factual, don't disclose deal terms, financing details, or a customer's personal information in the reply, and keep the tone professional even when the review feels unfair. If the review clearly violates DealerRater's content policy — for example, it's from someone who was never actually a customer — DealerRater has its own dispute process for that, separate from posting a public reply. DealerRater alongside Cars.com and CarGurus Most dealerships dealing with DealerRater are also watching Cars.com and CarGurus, since all three show up in the same shopper research process and often get checked within minutes of each other. Treating DealerRater as an isolated project, separate from your Google reviews and your Cars.com presence, is how review responses end up inconsistent in tone from one platform to the next — a shopper who reads a warm, specific reply on Google and then a generic one on DealerRater notices the difference. For the full picture of how sales and service reviews work across a dealership's platforms, see our broader guide on auto repair and dealership reputation management. 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.