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Has anyone here used or heard AutosToday ?
- Thread starter Tony0266
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- May 1, 2005
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Nope. Just looks like another one OF MANY inventory listing marketplace sites for generating leads - either direct to dealer or more likely for a larger lead provider.
The VDP design and layout looks familiar. Clean. Nice use of space on desktop.
What you asking?
The VDP design and layout looks familiar. Clean. Nice use of space on desktop.
What you asking?
- Apr 11, 2012
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- Matt
I was just coming on here to see if anyone was talking about this site! I found some 'interesting' results.
I hadn't heard of them until very recent and see Google really likes them, placing them above Autotrader and Cargurus for many search results. They currently have over 327,000 indexed pages on google.
So looking into it I noticed they are scraping dealer websites and listing dealer inventory without approval from the dealership.
One of our dealers that had requested a feed told us to stop it a week later. She said the leads they were getting were "strange". They weren't very local at all and it's like the car buyer didn't know the dealership was far away either.
So I did some more digging and on one of our dealers it was scraping the inventory from I submitted a lead...
Both times, the lead came back telling me about a completely different dealership. So not related to vehicle I wanted to "check availability" on?? Plus it showed me 5 other vehicle options from dealers in other states. I'm not sure how that helps the car buyer?
But yeah, looks like their play is use your cars to push leads to paying dealers (so the paying dealer sees more leads than they actually are getting)...and confusing the heck out of the car buyer.
I'm still waiting to hear back from my dealer I submitted the lead on to see if he gets any communication. I'm assuming he'll get a sales phone call.
I hadn't heard of them until very recent and see Google really likes them, placing them above Autotrader and Cargurus for many search results. They currently have over 327,000 indexed pages on google.
So looking into it I noticed they are scraping dealer websites and listing dealer inventory without approval from the dealership.
One of our dealers that had requested a feed told us to stop it a week later. She said the leads they were getting were "strange". They weren't very local at all and it's like the car buyer didn't know the dealership was far away either.
So I did some more digging and on one of our dealers it was scraping the inventory from I submitted a lead...
Both times, the lead came back telling me about a completely different dealership. So not related to vehicle I wanted to "check availability" on?? Plus it showed me 5 other vehicle options from dealers in other states. I'm not sure how that helps the car buyer?
But yeah, looks like their play is use your cars to push leads to paying dealers (so the paying dealer sees more leads than they actually are getting)...and confusing the heck out of the car buyer.
I'm still waiting to hear back from my dealer I submitted the lead on to see if he gets any communication. I'm assuming he'll get a sales phone call.
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✨ AI Highlights
- Dealers discuss AutosToday, an inventory listing marketplace that ranks highly in Google search results, with concerns that it scrapes dealer inventory without permission and generates low-quality leads from buyers unaware of dealership locations.
- Matt Kelley's investigation revealed the site is inappropriately listing inventory from dealers who never authorized it and that leads generated appear to come from bot traffic rather than genuine customers.
- The key insight is that despite AutosToday's strong search engine visibility, it operates without dealer consent and produces questionable lead quality.
Dealers discuss AutosToday, an inventory listing marketplace that ranks highly in Google search results, with concerns that it scrapes dealer inventory without permission and generates low-quality leads from buyers unaware of dealership locations. Matt Kelley's investigation revealed the site is inappropriately listing inventory from dealers who never authorized it and that leads generated appear to come from bot traffic rather than genuine customers. The key insight is that despite AutosToday's strong search engine visibility, it operates without dealer consent and produces questionable lead quality.
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