DealerRater: A Review Guide for Dealerships and Service Departments

By the Expert Reputation team · Updated September 30, 2026

DealerRater is a review site built specifically for car dealerships, covering both the sales floor and the service department. Its reviews can rate individual employees, feed into your Cars.com page, and be answered publicly or privately, so managing it well means handling the dealership and your people at the same time.

Who uses DealerRater and why it matters

DealerRater reviews are about dealership experiences. When a customer writes one, DealerRater asks them to choose the reason for the visit (New Sales, Used Sales or Service), name the vehicle, and rate up to 10 dealership employees they worked with. That makes it one of the few review sites where a service advisor, finance manager or salesperson builds a visible, individual track record.

DealerRater is a Cars.com company, and for dealers with a Cars.com package, DealerRater reviews and your public replies also appear on your Cars.com dealer page (see our Cars.com dealer reviews guide). A review you handle on DealerRater is therefore often read on two sites.

Independent repair and body shops: DealerRater's help center, review form and guidelines are written for dealerships and their sales and service departments. We found nothing in its official documentation describing listings for independent repair shops, collision centers or detailers. If you run one of those, your review effort is better spent on Google, Yelp and other general review sites.

How to claim your DealerRater page

A Basic Listing account is free and lets you claim your dealership page. DealerRater's steps:

1. Search for your dealership on DealerRater.com (DealerRater.ca in Canada).
2. Scroll to the bottom of your dealership's page and select Claim This Page.
3. Enter your first and last name, job title and email address.
4. Your request goes to DealerRater's Client Services Team.

DealerRater asks you to claim with an account registered to your dealership email address. If you do not have a dealership-domain email, someone at the dealership has to authorize your access. DealerRater says you should hear back within two business days.

Once in the Dealer Panel, administrators work from the Reviews tab, where the All Reviews view shows DealerRater and Cars.com reviews automatically. Google and Facebook reviews can be connected separately.

How DealerRater reviews and ratings work

Who may write a review

DealerRater's Community Guidelines say every review must be written and submitted by the consumer, and:

• It must be written on the customer's own device, not one supplied or owned by the dealership. A "review kiosk" or a salesperson's tablet on the showroom floor breaks this rule.
• It cannot come from dealership employees, their immediate family members, or anyone who works with dealerships in a way that presents a conflict of interest.
• It cannot be submitted on someone else's behalf (with an exception for caretakers or family helping someone unable to post).
• It should describe an experience from the past 12 months, and only one review per dealership experience is accepted.
• It needs at least 15 words.

DealerRater's reporting guide goes further on affiliation: reviewers cannot be affiliated with any auto dealership or manufacturer currently or within the past five years, and that extends to immediate family, wholesalers, exporters and fleet managers.

Reviewers confirm their review through an email link, and DealerRater says their email address is not shown publicly or shared with the dealership.

How your rating is calculated

DealerRater says your overall score uses all lifetime review scores, with more weight on recent reviews. A run of recent reviews moves your score more than old ones, in both directions.

Employee mentions

Each review can tag employees and give each one a rating, and those tags show beside the review. Two points from DealerRater's help center catch managers out:

• Wrong person tagged? DealerRater recommends a private response asking the reviewer to edit their review. Reviewers can update the review, including the employee tags, at any time. DealerRater does not list a wrong tag as a reason to report.
• Staff turnover. When an employee leaves, reviews about them stay on your dealership's page and cannot be moved to their new dealership.

How to get more DealerRater reviews within the rules

DealerRater's own guidance is straightforward: give good service, ask customers directly, follow up with a link to your review page, and resolve problems. Its paid ReviewBuilder tool sends requests to all of your sales and service customers who have not already reviewed you, and reviews that come through it can carry a "Verified Customer" badge because the reviewer was matched to dealership records.

Keep your process clean:

• Ask every customer, not just happy ones. Screening out unhappy customers before they reach a review site is known as review gating. Google's Maps policy prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews, and the FTC's Q&A on its review rule warns the practice could violate the FTC Act.
• Do not pay for reviews. Under the FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR § 465.4), offering anything of value conditioned on a positive review is illegal. Google's policy bans incentives for any review. See our guide to incentives and FTC compliance.
• No employee or family reviews. DealerRater prohibits them, and 16 CFR § 465.5 restricts undisclosed reviews by company insiders.
• Hand the customer a link, not a device. The review must come from the customer's own device.

A caution about employee-driven asks

DealerRater is built around rating individual employees, and dealerships often tie staff recognition to review mentions. Be careful carrying that habit to Google: Google's Maps content policy now lists "merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews" and "requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member" as rating manipulation. Review quotas and "please mention my name on Google" scripts can put your Google profile at risk even where they are normal on DealerRater.

How to respond to DealerRater reviews

DealerRater gives you two reply types from the Dealer Panel (Reviews > All Reviews):

• Public response: shown beneath the review for everyone, and for Cars.com dealers, also on Cars.com. DealerRater recommends a public response in most cases.
• Private response: sent directly to the reviewer. DealerRater suggests using it to learn more about the experience, confirm who the customer is, and work toward a fix. After resolving an issue privately, you can ask the customer whether they would like to update their review.

For negative reviews, DealerRater recommends going private first, then replying publicly, and reporting only if the review actually violates its rules. Its advice for the public reply is to "take the high road," because future customers are reading it.

Example reply to a negative service review:

Thank you for telling us about this, [First Name]. A wait like that isn't the experience we want for any service customer. I'd like to look into what happened with your appointment. Please call me directly at [Phone] or reply to the private message I've sent. [Name], Service Manager, [Dealership Name]

Example reply to a positive sales review:

Congratulations on your new [Model], [First Name]! We're glad [Employee First Name] made the process easy, and we'll share your kind words with the team. See you at your first service visit. [Dealership Name]

Keep replies factual. Do not argue about deal numbers in public, do not post a customer's personal or financing details, and do not accuse a reviewer of lying. The FTC rule (16 CFR § 465.7) prohibits using groundless legal threats, intimidation or knowingly false public accusations to get a review removed. More: how to respond to negative reviews.

How to report or dispute a DealerRater review

You can report DealerRater reviews and Cars.com dealer reviews from the Dealer Panel:

1. Log in with an account that has administrative access for your dealership.
2. Go to Reviews in the header and choose All Reviews.
3. Find the review and click report.
4. Fill in the required fields and submit. The report goes to DealerRater's moderation team.

DealerRater's help center does not publish a turnaround time. Be specific: its guidance says vague reports are harder to act on.

What DealerRater will and won't act on

The Community Guidelines also allow removal of obscenities, discriminatory or defamatory content, harassment and threats, content encouraging illegal activity, spam and links, and contact information such as phone numbers or addresses.

What is not on the list: a review that is simply negative, a star rating you think is unfair, or a customer's opinion of your prices or service. For those, the response is your tool. There is no guarantee any reported review will be removed; DealerRater decides.

If your report is rejected

DealerRater's help center does not describe a formal appeal. Practical next steps:

• Send a private response if you have not already, and try to resolve the underlying issue. Customers can edit their own reviews.
• Post a calm public reply so readers see your side.
• If you learn new facts (for example, you confirm the reviewer is a former employee), submit a new report with that evidence.
• Keep collecting reviews from every customer so one review carries less weight in a recency-weighted score.

If someone threatens to post negative reviews unless you pay, or offers to remove reviews for a fee, read our guide to review removal scams and extortion.

Common DealerRater mistakes

• Showroom tablets or kiosks for reviews. Reviews must come from the customer's own device.
• Staff reviewing their own dealership, or asking relatives to. Prohibited, and easy to detect with matching device and account data.
• Reporting reviews because they are negative. It wastes your credibility with the moderation team.
• Ignoring service-department reviews. Service reviews count toward the same dealership score.
• Public replies that argue numbers. Take pricing and financing disputes to a private response or a phone call.
• Copying DealerRater-style employee asks onto Google, where naming staff in solicited reviews is now against policy.

Expert Reputation's Review IQ can monitor DealerRater alongside Google and your other review sites and send review requests to every customer. For the other big automotive platform, see the CarGurus dealer reviews guide.