Turn your CarGurus dealer rating into more inquiries.

CarGurus isn’t primarily a review site — it’s a car-shopping marketplace. Shoppers search inventory, and CarGurus ranks and labels listings partly with its own price-based "Deal Rating," flagging each car as a Great, Good, Fair, or High/Overpriced Deal relative to similar vehicles nearby. Reputation sits right next to that price signal: every dealership carries its own star rating and review count, visible on the same results page a shopper is using to compare five or six dealers at once.

That combination is what makes CarGurus distinct. A shopper who has already found a fair-priced car from you still has to decide whether to trust your dealership over the next one with a similar deal — and the dealer star rating is usually the tiebreaker. CarGurus reputation management is the work of making sure that tiebreaker favors you: a strong, current rating built from real buyers, backed by responses to the reviews you already have.

Why CarGurus reputation works at the dealer level

Unlike platforms built around an individual salesperson's profile, CarGurus attaches its rating to the dealership as a whole. Every review a buyer leaves — about the car, the negotiation, the paperwork, the pickup experience — rolls up into one dealer-level star rating that appears on every listing that dealership has on the marketplace, not just the car the reviewer bought.

That means the rating compounds across your whole inventory rather than resetting per listing or per rep, and it also means a handful of bad experiences can drag down every single car you have posted. Because CarGurus shoppers are actively comparing dealers on the same search results page, rating and review volume function less like background trust and more like a direct input into which dealer gets the call.

The Deal Rating and the star rating are separate systems: Deal Rating is CarGurus' own price-analysis label on a specific listing, while the star rating is entirely driven by buyer reviews of the dealership. A dealer can have Great Deal pricing across their inventory and still lose inquiries to a lower-priced competitor with a materially better star rating — price gets the click, reputation gets the call.