FAQ

Our subscription prices are tailored to each dealership’s specific characteristics, lead and connection performance, and market area, and factor in conservative margin estimates to ensure you can maintain a healthy return on investment from your CarGurus subscription.

We encourage you to have a detailed conversation about connection and lead volumes, close rates, and profit per car with your rep to understand how CarGurus is delivering a positive return on your investment.

CarGurus’ deal rating takes many factors into account, such as make, model, year, trim, options, mileage, vehicle history and geography.

This information comes to us via your inventory feed. We work closely with hundreds of feed providers, and the vast majority of trim and options data comes through correctly.

However, in the rare cases that incorrect information is displayed, we make it easy for you to check and update the trim and options on your cars in our dealer dashboard.

Our CPO deal ratings do factor in reconditioning, as those programs are standardized by OEMs and we can verify the data.

However, unlike trim and options, individual dealer reconditioning isn't a standard enough item for us to programmatically figure it into deal ratings. In this case, our recommendation is for you to highlight the reconditioning in the listing text and price it as you see fit.

A dealer's subscription status is not part of the algorithm that determines a car's IMV or deal rating. The only dealer factor included in the deal rating is the dealership rating, as determined by consumer reviews on CarGurus. Higher-ranked dealers get a small lift in their deal ratings to represent that dealer's better reputation.

This unbiased approach to search rankings has been a differentiator of ours since the company was founded. We've always believed that what is best for the car shopper is best for the dealer, and that starts with providing a trustworthy experience on our platform.

The email notification you get when a shopper leaves a review includes an invitation to respond to the review directly or challenge it as fraudulent.

The best approach to negative reviews is to respond publicly, honestly, and calmly. Keep in mind that you're not necessarily trying to win the reviewer over -- you're writing a response to demonstrate to other shoppers that you're professional, reasonable, and trustworthy. 

If a review goes beyond just being negative into actually being deceptive or fraudulent, we'll look into it. Keep in mind:

• We will not remove negative reviews simply because they're negative. We will remove fraudulent reviews, we just need you to submit evidence of the fraud. 

• CarGurus strongly discourages dealerships from asking customers to write reviews while still at the dealership or providing any financial incentive to a consumer for leaving a review.

• Though they are still available to users, we do not include reviews older than 2 years when calculating a dealer's overall rating.

This can happen for a few reasons:

• Some of our partnerships with OEMs and dealer groups include automated inventory feeds
• Your inventory software or web site software may be configured to automatically syndicate inventory to us and possibly other third-party sites
• An old integration between CarGurus and your dealership might still be running

CarGurus does not scrape inventory. Inventory on CarGurus comes from feeds that dealers send us through the dealers’ inventory partners or web site host partners.

If your inventory is appearing on CarGurus and you’d like it removed, use this form or call (800) 227-4878 (9am – 5pm Eastern, M-F).