Anyone else experiencing aggressive upsell tactics and retaliation from CarGurus?

[fcautosales]

My account manager called me yesterday and put me in a virtual meeting with some sort of ai specialist after I complained that what we were paying was not worth the amount of sales we close with the leads they sent us. The guy had the audacity to try to charge us 300 more for some sort of ai tool was acting like a character out of the Sopranos and started making weird threats and belittling our ability to close sales. He told me you are stuck with us and good luck paying 1000 a month because you are locked in and if you miss a payment we are going to send collections after you. Any one else experience anything similar with Cargurus? With our current inventory we were getting like 5 leads a day and the day after that call they seemed to have cut us off.

 

[joe.pistell]

Currently, the AIs that I've been using to go car shopping are using the third-party sites, classified sites, to go used car shopping. It was always my thought that AI would recognize that the inventory on these sites is not complete and that they would go past these aggregators and go directly to the retailer that's selling it. This is not the case so far in my circles.

Someone _should_ build an aggregator site just for AI that links to all dealers, or rather, presents the data from all dealers into an AI-centric, machine-centered UI. No advertisers, no fake sorting. Maybe some sort of simple subscription, just to validate the dealers' authenticity, to become a source of authority for the AI machines.

 

[dmitr33]

My account manager called me yesterday and put me in a virtual meeting with some sort of ai specialist after I complained that what we were paying was not worth the amount of sales we close with the leads they sent us. The guy had the audacity to try to charge us 300 more for some sort of ai tool was acting like a character out of the Sopranos and started making weird threats and belittling our ability to close sales. He told me you are stuck with us and good luck paying 1000 a month because you are locked in and if you miss a payment we are going to send collections after you. Any one else experience anything similar with Cargurus? With our current inventory we were getting like 5 leads a day and the day after that call they seemed to have cut us off.

That would definitely make me uncomfortable, especially if the conversation actually went from discussing lead quality to threats about collections and being “stuck” in a contract. I’d document everything from that call, including the dates, names and what was said, and review the contract carefully. If the leads suddenly stopped afterward, I’d keep records of that too.

 

[dealerdata1]

Currently, the AIs that I've been using to go car shopping are using the third-party sites, classified sites, to go used car shopping. It was always my thought that AI would recognize that the inventory on these sites is not complete and that they would go past these aggregators and go directly to the retailer that's selling it. This is not the case so far in my circles.

Someone _should_ build an aggregator site just for AI that links to all dealers, or rather, presents the data from all dealers into an AI-centric, machine-centered UI. No advertisers, no fake sorting. Maybe some sort of simple subscription, just to validate the dealers' authenticity, to become a source of authority for the AI machines.

It is kind of hard to force the AI down a certain path as it just kind of spills out everywhere

Take a simple website llms.txt for example and barely any AI actually read that file on the website. Hell, I even ran a test to confirm it and of 140 runs, it only pulled the llms.txt off a website 3 times, and it had no impact on the quality of response

From the data we have analyzed for dealers on CarGurus, listings do generally seem to perform ok, but anything outside of that is pretty poor. But open to being wrong and finding the dealer that has great performance from the CarGurus advertising