Research · Annual Index · 2025
The 2025 Automotive Reputation Index.
A cross-category study of how US franchised dealerships earn, hold, and risk customer reputation in 2025 — built on 38,420 verified closing-record reviews across 412 rooftops in 11 metro markets, joined against the corresponding dealer reply queue and response-time metadata. Category medians, rubric weights, and the per-dimension findings form the full report.
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Methodology recap
Four dimensions, the same weights as the rubric.
The full report follows the franchised-dealership rubric published on /research/methodology: review velocity and response speed carry the most weight, FTC-verified share sits next, and average star rating is the lightest dimension — capped by verified share so a strong average built on unverified feedback cannot outrank a softer average backed by real closing records.
New verified feedback per month, normalised by rooftop tenure so a fresh storefront is not penalised.
Share of inbound reviews that received a dealer reply, expressed as a percentage.
Share of a rooftop’s reviews that can be traced to a verified closing record under the 2024 FTC fake-reviews rule.
Mean of every review row tagged to the rooftop, capped by FTC-verified share so a strong average built on unverified feedback cannot outrank a weaker average built on verified records.
How the numbers were collected
Source
Verified closing-record reviews ingested by Curbmark between Jan 2024 and Dec 2024. No paid placements. No manual rewrites.
Coverage
412 franchised rooftops across 11 US metro markets. Site visits limited to dealership groups with at least 24 verified reviews in the period.
Rubric
Four dimensions, weighted toward velocity and response and capped on star rating by FTC-verified share. Same rubric as the per-rooftop benchmarks widget.