- Apr 16, 2026
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- Emily
Hey, Emily here. I’m breaking the R-E-V format today because I feel this story deserves its own narrative. Melissa Terrell, Widewail’s recently hired COO (formerly Dealerware), is fantastic, and her commentary in the videos is a must-watch.
Three weeks back, the FTC put out a release with the list of the 97 dealers that got warning letters in March.
If you run a store or a group, this isn't news — it's been a headline almost every week of 2026, and the anxious question at every event is the same: "How do we assess our risk?"
We think your Google reviews can answer that pretty well, so we took a first pass to show what we mean.
Pull up the Google listings for the dealers who got those letters, scroll the way a customer would, and you wouldn't notice much. Their star ratings looked like everybody else's. Whatever got them flagged wasn't visible on the surface.
So we dug in. We sit on 18,000 rooftops and 20 million reviews, so we ran the analysis: how did the flagged dealers actually look different?
The letter recipients had a much higher share of negative reviews for the exact behaviors the FTC cares about:
Melissa Terrell, Widewail's COO, breaks down our findings here.
72% of dealers have had at least one review since the start of 2024 that tripped one of our FTC-specific tags. A bad review isn't a fineable complaint, but this isn't a niche problem either — we found an average of 40,000 flagged reviews per year.
Tracking and tagging reviews is how patterns emerge, and nobody has time to do that by hand. Once you can see it clearly, you can make a real call instead of a guess: run the audit, talk to the team, or decide it was a one-off and move on. The Widewail team gets into the importance of knowing what's happening in your reviews in this short clip.
Two things worth flagging if you want to go deeper:
1. We ran a live session last week on industry reviews and FTC topic analysis — full dataset, the topics that separated the flagged dealers, and a live look at how to run the analysis for your own store. See the recording.
2. Yesterday, Jake Hughes and I did a live walk through of the new Q1 2026 Voice of the Customer Report. We read 1.15M reviews across 18,000+ dealerships in Q1 and found something we didn't expect: the people got better, but communication got worse. We dug into what's driving it, plus a shift in who's actually reading your reviews now. Check it out if you have a few minutes.
Happy to get into any of it in the thread.
Three weeks back, the FTC put out a release with the list of the 97 dealers that got warning letters in March.
If you run a store or a group, this isn't news — it's been a headline almost every week of 2026, and the anxious question at every event is the same: "How do we assess our risk?"
We think your Google reviews can answer that pretty well, so we took a first pass to show what we mean.
What we found
Pull up the Google listings for the dealers who got those letters, scroll the way a customer would, and you wouldn't notice much. Their star ratings looked like everybody else's. Whatever got them flagged wasn't visible on the surface.
So we dug in. We sit on 18,000 rooftops and 20 million reviews, so we ran the analysis: how did the flagged dealers actually look different?
1. Where's the risk actually hiding?
The letter recipients had a much higher share of negative reviews for the exact behaviors the FTC cares about:
- Bait-and-switch
- Deceptive advertising
- Undisclosed F&I add-ons
Melissa Terrell, Widewail's COO, breaks down our findings here.
2. How common is this?
72% of dealers have had at least one review since the start of 2024 that tripped one of our FTC-specific tags. A bad review isn't a fineable complaint, but this isn't a niche problem either — we found an average of 40,000 flagged reviews per year.
Tracking and tagging reviews is how patterns emerge, and nobody has time to do that by hand. Once you can see it clearly, you can make a real call instead of a guess: run the audit, talk to the team, or decide it was a one-off and move on. The Widewail team gets into the importance of knowing what's happening in your reviews in this short clip.
Two things worth flagging if you want to go deeper:
1. We ran a live session last week on industry reviews and FTC topic analysis — full dataset, the topics that separated the flagged dealers, and a live look at how to run the analysis for your own store. See the recording.
2. Yesterday, Jake Hughes and I did a live walk through of the new Q1 2026 Voice of the Customer Report. We read 1.15M reviews across 18,000+ dealerships in Q1 and found something we didn't expect: the people got better, but communication got worse. We dug into what's driving it, plus a shift in who's actually reading your reviews now. Check it out if you have a few minutes.
Happy to get into any of it in the thread.
