At least 266 Google Business Profile pages (GBPs) are tied to auto retail giant Carvana.
Of those, 101 check out as real Carvana facilities, from its vending machines to its seven new-car dealerships.
Carvana’s listings, the company told CDG News, help local shoppers find cars that can be delivered to or picked up in their area.
However, a closer look at 109 of the other GBPs reveals addresses across 36 states that belong to other destinations, none of them Carvana dealerships, as one example below shows.
The screenshot shows a GBP listing for a Carvana dealership in Salem, Ore.
And this screenshot shows what the address leads to: a city building.
Nearly 60 Google reviews reflect customer reactions, several after heading to those spots.
“THIS IS NOT CARAVANA! This is a jewelry store,” a reviewer on the Appleton, Wisconsin, listing wrote two months ago.
What to know: Chris Wood, a self-described data nerd, curious mind, and VP of client strategy at LocaliQ Automotive, which helps dealers with advertising, began independently tracking Carvana’s Stellantis dealerships in May, using registration data and more.
Wood told CDG News that early on in his research, he noticed Carvana near the top of new Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram vehicle listing ads in markets where it had no physical stores.
He said this piqued his interest since those ads generally require a local, brick-and-mortar presence.
From there: He searched “Carvana Salem,” and the address was a municipal building three blocks from his old office.
“I did a reverse search on the address just to make sure I wasn’t wrong,” Wood said. “I thought, maybe in the years since I left Salem, Carvana had opened a store there. But when I searched the address, it came back to a municipal government building. That’s when I thought, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’”
This later led him and his team to uncover more than 40 locations of so-called phantom pages, where the address leads to something other than a dealership or auto facility, a number that would grow with more searching.
His findings, along with co-research from CDG News:
51 listings directing customers to civic or government buildings
58 unrelated businesses, homes, parking lots, and other non-Carvana sites
49 live Carvana pages with no address listed, known in the industry as service-area business (SAB) profiles
101 real Carvana facilities: 39 vending machines; 37 back-end sites, such as inspection, ADESA, logistics, and corporate offices; 18 hubs or storefronts; and its seven Stellantis dealerships
3 unresolved, excluded from all claims
4 belonged to unrelated businesses with similar names and were excluded
(The counts reflect listings as verified Oct. 13. Google Business Profiles are live and can be changed or removed at any time, and more could be out there.)
How we know they’re Carvana’s: Most, but not all, of the live pages CDG News checked carry a GMB code on their website button, a tracking tag such as gmb-CarvMON that tells Carvana’s analytics which listing a visitor clicked through from.
The pattern: By city-proper population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and local data estimates, the median for cities with real Carvana facilities is about 195,000, compared with about 68,000 for the phantom-address cities. In the false-address cities, shown in the map below, 72% have fewer than 100,000 people.
Carvana Google Business Profiles at non-Carvana addresses, as of Oct. 13, 2026. These are live and can change.
Regarding reviews: Real Carvana facilities, excluding its headquarters, have about 40,700 Google reviews, and about two-thirds are positive and just under one-third negative. The 109 phantom pages have 630 reviews total, with about one-quarter positive and two-thirds negative.
“Not here dunno where it is,” one reviewer wrote publicly under the Carvana Morristown, Tennessee, listing.
Another reviewer who trekked to Santa Fe, New Mexico, said they tried to correct the address on Google Maps, but said it rejected the edit.
“Carvana just advertises like they have cars in the town you’re in, but they don’t have a physical location in Santa Fe. Thanks for wasting my time driving there,” the reviewer wrote two months ago.
See an example listing below that shows what a search reveals, what the address check shows it really is, and the ads that can come up during such a search.
Asked whether it was aware of the listings or the reviews, Carvana told CDG News, “The best place to see Carvana’s reviews in full is carvana.com/reviews.”
Why this matters: According to Google’s published Vehicle Listing Ads (VLA) guidelines for dealers, retailers must have a brick-and-mortar location to advertise in local markets. Another example of a search result is below.
However, a new beta program designed to help national-level retailers such as Carvana appears to allow advertising across all markets without having a building in the market.
It is unclear if Carvana is involved with that program or another arrangement with Google that allows similar sway.
Google did not respond to requests for comment sent to its media email address.
When asked about the purpose of its Google Business Profiles, Carvana told CDG News that the listings “help customers searching locally find Carvana vehicles that can be delivered to or picked up in their area.”
“Because of our e-commerce model, the physical location of the vehicle is less relevant to who we can serve,” the company said. “But, we want to help customers searching locally choose among the broadest selection and learn about our service in their area.”
Either way, even if Carvana does have an alternate agreement, creating listings at addresses where a business doesn’t operate still risks creating negative experiences for consumers, and walks the line of Google’s policies, sources told CDG News.
Frank Loeffler, head of AI services for CarGenius, has worked in Google search engine optimization for more than a decade and has extensive automotive industry experience.
His take:
“Creating fake or misleading Google Business Profiles at addresses where a business doesn’t actually operate violates Google’s policies, misleads consumers, and undermines the trust and credibility that both Google and businesses like Carvana depend on,” Loeffler said.
Speaking of consumers: Attorney Adam Crowell, chief strategy and legal officer with KPA, a provider of automotive compliance software, training, and services for dealerships, said he would advise dealerships against setting up phantom Google Business locations.
“This could cause reasonable consumers to be misled and possibly draw UDAP claims under state or federal law,” Crowell said. “Additionally, there are concerns over whether this would violate Google’s terms of service, and concerns over how a state dealership licensing agency would react to allegedly conducting business away from a licensed premises.”
Asked how Carvana stays compliant with Federal Trade Commission rules when a vehicle may be far from where its ad appears, the retailer told CDG News it has “always believed in transparent, fixed pricing.”
“Like the used business, today Carvana’s new vehicle listings have the same sticker price no matter where the customer sits,” the company said. “We do not charge dealer or documentation fees.”
The bigger question: If Carvana already has permission to advertise everywhere and access to the VLA shelf, what advantage could such a page provide?
We asked Sarah Grajewski, chief operating officer of PureCars, and Nicole Santana, its senior director of media performance, about Google ads. PureCars runs ad campaigns for dealers of all sizes and, in some cases, works directly with automakers.
How it works: To run vehicle listing ads, a dealer has to link its Google Business Profile to the Merchant Center account; this is how the inventory is processed for advertising, Grajewski said. The ads then show only in the area around the store.
Grajewski said profile verification has grown more difficult; it previously relied on tasks such as mailing a postcard with a verification code to the physical address.
Some dealers she worked with before, whose profiles were suspended, had to drive to each store and send Google photos or videos of themselves at the spot.
Creating and verifying profiles without an actual business location goes against Google’s policies, she said.
“They’re definitely picking addresses and registering them as a Carvana, and then I don’t know what Google is sending them to prove it, but that is quite a few to get away with,” Grajewski said.
The caveat: Google can approve one account to advertise vehicles nationally, Grajewski said. Meaning, Carvana could have its own arrangement with Google for its ads that has nothing to do with the pages.
Even with such a deal, the pages can still lift Carvana in regular, unpaid search results, Santana said.
For one, Google Business Profiles influence SEO, which shapes everything on a search page below the paid ads.
SEO is also a big part of Google’s AI Overviews, she said, which could put Carvana in play where it has no brick-and-mortar location.
“Even if they do have some sort of like handshake agreement with Google or whatever the case may be, they could still be influencing the traffic that they’re getting and taking it away from local dealers if they’re using that as an SEO play to show up organically,” Santana said.
Why it works: “There is a benefit in organic search with them showing up as a local used car dealer even though there is not actually a location in the area,” Grajewski said. “That drives traffic to their website and allows for a shopper to consider buying online vs. shopping local.”
If Carvana has no such deal and is using the pages to run its vehicle listing ads, the benefit would be “much greater,” Grajewski said, adding that she would hate to speculate on that without comment from Carvana or Google.
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The legal view: Dealers make big investments under a franchise system where market areas and the location of competing stores carry legal weight, Seth Dobbs, chair of the national automotive practice group at law firm Fox Rothschild, told CDG News.
“A dealer’s market area should not be redefined simply by dropping a virtual pin on a Google map,” Dobbs said.
In other words, if an online retailer is creating Google Business Profiles at addresses where it has no dealership, “particularly government buildings or other unrelated properties,” as Dobbs said, “that raises legitimate questions about consumer transparency and fair competition.”
Bottom line: Dobbs added that this is not about restricting Carvana’s ability to compete in those markets.
“Competition benefits consumers,” he said. “The issue is whether all participants are competing under a consistent set of rules and whether consumers are receiving an accurate representation of where a dealership is actually located.”
– CDG’s Head of Editorial, Ash Savage, contributed to this report.
