Smart Response transforms
how dealers respond to reviews

Never miss a chance to highlight happy customers

Only 40% of dealers respond to all their reviews¹, leaving valuable opportunities for shopper
trust on the table.

Smart Response helps you close that gap. Now included with Cars.com Premium and Premium+ marketplace subscriptions, it uses generative AI to quickly and consistently respond to every positive review.

By combining the speed of AI with the nuance of human experts, Smart Response helps you build loyalty, improve local SEO, and meet OEM review response requirements — without adding extra work for your team.

How Smart Response works

Smart Response uses generative AI trained on real reviews and responses to automatically draft personalized replies to positive reviews on Cars.com and DealerRater.

These AI-generated responses reflect your dealership’s tone of voice and include relevant keywords to support local SEO — without templates or repetitive phrasing. Before publishing, each reply is reviewed by a human moderator to ensure it’s accurate, on-brand, and appropriate.

For negative reviews, our expert team takes the lead by personally reviewing each one and crafting a professional, dealership-branded response designed to de-escalate concerns and demonstrate your commitment to resolution.

Stay in control while automating responses

Smart Response is built to save you time while keeping your dealership’s voice front and center.

It keeps you in control through:

• Responses appear as if posted directly by your store
• Every reply is reviewed by a human moderator for quality and alignment
• You maintain full visibility and can edit any response before or after it’s published

This balance allows you to scale responses confidently while staying closely involved in how your dealership appears to shoppers.

Strengthen your reputation at scale

Reviews are a visible signal of trust, responsiveness, and professionalism — often influencing shopper decisions before they ever contact your dealership.

Smart Response is trained on the industry’s largest review dataset — over 15.7 million verified dealer reviews on Cars.com² — to help generate accurate, contextually relevant replies based on real interactions.

It helps your dealership:

• Acknowledge every positive review, every time
• Demonstrate active engagement across the review platforms shoppers trust
• Keep your review presence fresh and consistent

By automating review responses at scale, Smart Response supports a stronger, more consistent reputation without adding work for your staff.