- Feb 17, 2021
- 118
- 80
- Awards
- 4
- First Name
- Jake
A few weeks back, the FTC sent warning letters to 97 dealer groups about deceptive pricing. We were curious how visible that signal was in the customers' own words before the agency acted. We looked at the Widewail Index (~20M Google reviews) for signals.
The original look was Q1-only. The 97 letter recipients carried about 2x the negative review sentiment of the market in exactly the categories the agency cited — pricing, F&I, deals/advertising, bait-and-switch. Their star ratings were normal. The signal lived one layer down in the topic-level content.
That was the small dataset. Our data team just finished the wider analysis, which has uncovered even more compelling information.
The multi-year, industry-wide view of this issue:
- 1.1M 1- and 2-star reviews
- ~18,000 US dealerships
- January 2024 → June 2026 (2.5 years)
- Two-stage detection — lexical filter, then LLM verification anchored on FTC and the conduct underlying the vacated CARS Rule
- 97,140 confirmed signals, each with a verbatim customer sentence captured as evidence
The two top-line numbers most worth sharing here:
About 1 in 11 negative auto-dealer reviews now contains a confirmed FTC-relevant compliance signal. About 72% of US dealerships in the dataset — ~13,500 — have at least one over the 2.5-year window.
The 97 the FTC warned about weren't a unique cluster. They were the slice the regulators picked. The customer voice has been writing this story across the industry for years.
And possibly most interestingly, the share of FTC-related complaints is growing.
2025 more than 2024.
More yet in 2026.
We're walking through it live on Thursday, June 18, at 12 PM ET — Melissa Terrell, Paul Stansik, and me. 30 minutes. REGISTER HERE.
Happy to answer questions in the thread. If you're interested in looking at your store's topic data, shoot me a note. We have that too.
— Jake, Widewail
The original look was Q1-only. The 97 letter recipients carried about 2x the negative review sentiment of the market in exactly the categories the agency cited — pricing, F&I, deals/advertising, bait-and-switch. Their star ratings were normal. The signal lived one layer down in the topic-level content.
That was the small dataset. Our data team just finished the wider analysis, which has uncovered even more compelling information.
The multi-year, industry-wide view of this issue:
- 1.1M 1- and 2-star reviews
- ~18,000 US dealerships
- January 2024 → June 2026 (2.5 years)
- Two-stage detection — lexical filter, then LLM verification anchored on FTC and the conduct underlying the vacated CARS Rule
- 97,140 confirmed signals, each with a verbatim customer sentence captured as evidence
The two top-line numbers most worth sharing here:
About 1 in 11 negative auto-dealer reviews now contains a confirmed FTC-relevant compliance signal. About 72% of US dealerships in the dataset — ~13,500 — have at least one over the 2.5-year window.
The 97 the FTC warned about weren't a unique cluster. They were the slice the regulators picked. The customer voice has been writing this story across the industry for years.
And possibly most interestingly, the share of FTC-related complaints is growing.
2025 more than 2024.
More yet in 2026.
We're walking through it live on Thursday, June 18, at 12 PM ET — Melissa Terrell, Paul Stansik, and me. 30 minutes. REGISTER HERE.
Happy to answer questions in the thread. If you're interested in looking at your store's topic data, shoot me a note. We have that too.
— Jake, Widewail
