Verified July 31, 2026

The guardrails are built in, not bolted on.

Vehicle advertising rules move, and they have shifted twice since early 2025. We track them so your team does not have to hold them in their head.

More usefully: most of what those rules require is enforced by the platform itself. Not a checklist we hand you, not a policy you have to remember on a busy Saturday. The system will not produce the copy in the first place. Here is exactly what that means.

What the platform enforces

The guardrails, specifically

Each of these is mechanical: a rule the generator cannot break, arithmetic instead of a language model, or a value the database will not accept.

One price, on every surface

At signup, every dealer attests that the price in their feed is the all-in price a buyer pays, excluding only tax and government fees.
That single number publishes as structured data everywhere we put your inventory. There is no drift between your listing pages and the syndication feeds, because they all read the same field.

Claims that cannot outrun the facts

AI-written listing copy may use only verified facts from your feed and the VIN decode. It cannot invent specs, history, prices, or market figures.
Warranty is computed from the vehicle age and mileage, never restated from the original terms. A listing cannot imply factory coverage that has already run out.
A market comparison appears only when live market data supports it, and the comparison set is described accurately. A national set is never called regional.
Claims about rival models must be backed by real market data and attributed as asking-price comparisons, never stated as bare fact.

Payment figures, and Regulation Z

A monthly payment, a term, or a down payment amount is a Reg Z trigger term: state one in an ad and you owe the APR and the full repayment terms alongside it. The model that writes your listing copy is barred from stating any of them, so a trigger term cannot reach your page through generated copy at all.
Every payment number on the platform is deterministic arithmetic you can audit line by line, never model output.
Where a payment is displayed, its assumptions travel with it: rate, term, down payment, and that it is on approved credit.
Payment display on vehicle detail pages is switched off on purpose while we finish the disclosure work. We would rather hold a feature back than put a trigger term on your page without the disclosure it requires.

Your real lender terms, one vocabulary

Credit tiers come from one fixed vocabulary shared by every surface, so the same words mean the same thing on your listings, your feeds, and your leads. No invented tiers.
Subprime terms book from your own lender sheet once your lender program is configured. A malformed sheet is rejected whole rather than half-applied, so a listing never quotes a term no lender will actually write.

Why this is live right now

The CARS Rule is gone. The standard it was built on is not.

The FTC’s CARS Rule was vacated by the Fifth Circuit in January 2025 on procedural grounds, and formally struck from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026. It is easy to read that as the rules going away. They did not. The FTC simply went back to Section 5 of the FTC Act, which it has used against dealers for decades and which carries no sunset.

Section 5 enforcement accelerated after the rule fell.

In March 2026 the FTC sent warning letters to 97 dealership groups over pricing practices, and pointed to pending enforcement actions as the template for what comes next. The standard it applied is simple: an advertised price has to be what a buyer can actually pay.

The moment a payment appears, a second law applies.

Regulation Z governs how credit is advertised. Quoting an APR on its own is fine. Quoting a monthly payment, a term, or a down payment amount is a trigger term, and it obliges you to disclose the APR and the full repayment terms with it. This is where otherwise careful dealers get caught, because a payment figure feels like marketing rather than a credit disclosure.

The five practices the FTC flagged

advertising a price that does not include every required fee
advertising a price built on rebates or discounts not available to all buyers
advertising a price that quietly assumes a required down payment
conditioning the advertised price on the buyer using dealer financing
requiring add-on products that are not in the advertised price

Your state

States layer their own price-disclosure and advertising rules on top of the federal floor, and state attorneys general enforce them independently of the FTC. This page does not attempt a fifty-state survey. Treat your own state’s rules as the stricter number and check them with counsel.

Canada

In Canada the Competition Act was amended in 2022 to target drip pricing directly: the only mandatory charges that may sit outside an advertised price are those imposed by government. Several provinces add their own all-in advertising rules, cost-of-credit disclosure sits on top of any payment figure, and CASL and PIPEDA govern how a lead may be contacted and stored.

What stays yours

You choose the price you publish. You decide your fees, your add-ons, and how you advertise everywhere else.

VIN Index is not a compliance vendor. We do not audit your advertising, monitor your other channels, or vouch for your dealership.

What we do is narrower and, we think, more useful: the surfaces we control will not generate a claim your facts do not support.

This page is information about how our platform behaves, not legal advice. Rules change and vary by state and province. Check your own obligations with counsel.

Sources

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