Who uses CARFAX
Car dealerships and service shops that work with CARFAX, and the car shoppers and owners who read their reviews. CARFAX describes its reviewers as verified customers who visited the business.
Claim your profile
- The CARFAX pages we checked do not describe a claim process for a dealer page.
- Dealers work with CARFAX through CARFAX for Dealers (carfaxfordealers.com), which offers sign-in to the dealer account and a Request Info form for new dealers.
- Existing dealer accounts get help by phone or email from CARFAX's dealer support page; CARFAX's business onboarding material also tells customers to contact their account manager with questions.
Replying to reviews
According to CARFAX's onboarding page for business customers, open the Ratings and Reviews tab in your CARFAX online account, click the green Respond button on a review, enter your reply, and click Respond again to publish. Responses appear under the review with the business name and date.
- CARFAX's terms of use tell reviewers that the dealer or service shop they review may respond, and that CARFAX does not control and has no duty to review, delete, or edit those responses.
- The same onboarding page says CARFAX offers suggested response templates for common issues and response best practices.
Review rules
In our own words. The official page is the rule that applies.
- Business pages present ratings as verified reviews from customers who visited the business, with labels such as Verified Service, and show each reviewer by vehicle owned rather than by name.
- Under CARFAX's terms, submissions may not be illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, or infringing, and may not contain spam, commercial solicitation, or political campaigning.
- Reviewers may not use a false email address, impersonate anyone, or mislead about where a submission came from, and they warrant that it is accurate and not misleading.
- CARFAX says it has the right, but not the obligation, to monitor, edit, or remove any submission.
- CARFAX does not guarantee the accuracy of ratings or reviews on its site.
Reporting a review
CARFAX's own process, step by step.
- The CARFAX pages we checked do not describe a way for businesses to report or dispute a review.
- The closest options are CARFAX's dealer support contacts (phone and email) for existing dealer accounts, or your CARFAX account manager.
CARFAX Reviews Widget
Show your CARFAX reviews on your own website, updated by themselves. Connect CARFAX in Grades.com, then copy a widget from Review Marketing in your dashboard with CARFAX as the only site (sites="carfax"). On WordPress, use [grades_widget preset="carousel" theme="light" accent="#6b42fe" sites="carfax"].
<script src="https://app.grades.com/embed/widget.js" data-widget="carousel" data-key="gk_pub_YOUR_KEY" data-theme="light" data-accent="#6b42fe" data-sites="carfax" async></script>
CARFAXReviews on grades.comCARFAXQuick to answer and easy to work with. They did exactly what they promised, on time.
CARFAXFriendly people and a fair price. I would happily go back and recommend them.
CARFAXThey explained every step and followed up afterwards. A great experience.
Tips
- Reply to both positive and negative reviews; CARFAX's own guidance says replies to negative reviews can help win back unhappy customers.
- Keep replies professional and specific, and offer a direct phone number or contact person for unresolved problems.
- Do not post personal details about the customer in a public reply.
- Keep the business hours, phone numbers, and services shown on your CARFAX page current.
Sources
Last checked October 27, 2026. Site rules change; the official pages are the final word.
- https://content.carfax.com/SVC-NUR-2020-Marketing-SLP-Onboarding-Reviews.html
- https://www.carfax.com/company/terms-of-use
- https://www.carfax.com/Dealerships
- https://www.carfaxfordealers.com/
- https://www.carfaxfordealers.com/dealer-support
About the numbers
- AI citations: the share of answers from AI assistants that cite a page on carfax.com, out of 23,227 answers in the last 90 days, to questions about the businesses in our directory ("what do customers say about ...") and to category questions ("best dentist in ..."). Search-result and help pages on a review site are not counted. As of October 30, 2026. ↩
- Cited by AI, by industry: for each industry (a directory category, or the national brands filed under an industry such as e-commerce), the share of AI answers about businesses in that industry that cite a page on carfax.com; n is the number of answers in that industry (last 90 days; only industries with at least 20 answers). As of October 30, 2026. ↩
- Has a profile, by industry: the share of the businesses we checked in each industry that have a CARFAX profile; n is the number of businesses checked in that industry. As of October 30, 2026. ↩
- States: the share of the businesses we checked in each state that have a CARFAX profile. States with too few businesses for a stable number are marked "small sample" and are not ranked; when every state is a small sample, none is shown. As of October 30, 2026. ↩
- Typical rating: the mean star rating of the CARFAX reviews we collected for the businesses we checked (35 reviews). As of October 30, 2026. ↩
- Site reach: the estimated monthly organic search visits to carfax.com (DataForSEO Labs) and its Domain Rating (Ahrefs, 0 to 100). These are third-party estimates for the whole domain, not figures from CARFAX. As of October 2026. ↩
How these numbers are collected: how we measure.