Just days after CDG News reported that 109 of Carvana’s phantom Google Business Profile listings showed as “Temporarily closed,” a re-check of all 143 found none still carrying that label, and 139 no longer show a panel at all.
Quick rewind: In October, researcher Chris Wood and CDG News reviewed 327 Google Business Profile pages tied to the online auto retail giant.
Of those, 143 were listed at addresses that were not Carvana sites: 77 civic or government buildings and 66 unrelated businesses, homes, parking lots, and other locations, across at least 39 states and D.C.
Another 106 of the 327 were real Carvana facilities, and most of the rest were pages with no address or listings already closed.
By Nov. 9, most were labeled “Temporarily closed” but still sent users to Carvana.com.
Now, nearly all of them are gone.
Where they stand: As of Nov. 12, only four panels remained at their listed addresses.
Two listings in North Carolina and Michigan are open, unchanged since Nov. 9. Meanwhile, a Pittsburgh panel still shows up but doesn’t say it’s open.
A Maryland listing appears, but shows as “permanently closed.”
Google gives no date for when a panel stopped showing or a label changed, and nothing in the panels says who set them or why.
The ads changed, too: In Ocala, Fla., and Huntsville, Ala., Carvana’s Google ads used to say its cars were in town. Now the same searches show them in Orlando, Fla., and Birmingham, Ala., cities where Carvana does have real locations.
In Salem, Ore., Carvana’s cars didn’t show up in Google’s ad row at all in two checks Thursday night (Nov. 12), though a Carvana text ad still appeared lower on the page under the name “Carvana® Salem.”
When searching for a specific model, Carvana’s cars showed up listed in Wood Village, Ore., about an hour away, where Carvana has an ADESA auction site.
Wood, VP of client strategy at LocaliQ Automotive, the USA Today Co.’s dealer advertising division, said the fact that the vehicle shopping ads continued appearing, but the geographic location associated with those vehicles had changed, caught his attention as much as the profiles going away.
“When the storefront disappears, but the advertising remains, it’s fair to ask what actually changed — the business, or just how consumers are being directed to it?” Wood said.
The screenshots below show the same searches in each market, before and after.
The above screenshot, taken Oct. 10, shows a Google search for used cars in Ocala, Fla. The screenshot below, snapped on Nov. 12, shows Carvana’s listings mostly all moved, from Ocala to Orlando.
For context: Carvana has described the listings as a way to help local shoppers find its vehicles for delivery or pickup in their area.
When the listings were labeled “Temporarily closed,” Nick Chivinski, VP of sales and strategy at SavvyDealer, told CDG News the label kept them “parked and ready to turn back on.”
He said the clean fix was to remove them or mark them permanently closed.
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Why the ads matter: Wood began digging around after noticing Carvana near the top of new Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram vehicle listing ads in markets where it had no physical stores, ads that generally require a local, physical building.
That matters because local dealers “show up because of proximity, and it’s a brick and mortar,” Wood said.
Google’s vehicle listing ad guidelines say retailers must have a brick-and-mortar location to advertise in local markets.
But a beta program for national retailers appears to allow advertising across all markets without a building there.
It’s unclear whether Carvana is part of that program or has another arrangement with Google.
Legal review: Seth Dobbs, chair of the national automotive practice group at Fox Rothschild, told CDG News in October that a dealer’s market area shouldn’t be redefined by a virtual pin on a map.
Profiles at addresses where a retailer has no dealership, he said, raise questions about consumer transparency and fair competition.
Adam Crowell, chief strategy and legal officer at KPA, said in October that he would advise dealers against setting up such listings, which he said could mislead consumers and possibly draw UDAP claims.
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