Auto Body Marketing HQ is an independent site for people who own auto body and collision shops and want work that does not arrive through a claims assignment.
Who writes it
Steve Meitler is the editor. He has spent years running marketing for local service businesses, collision and paint shops among them, and has watched the same pattern repeat in this trade: a shop that is excellent at repair planning and blend panels has no idea how a vehicle owner found it, or did not. Everything on this site is written so an owner can check it against their own numbers.
Where the benchmark numbers come from
The benchmark report comes from public Google Business Profile listings. We search Google Maps for auto body and collision shops in every state, capture the public fields on each listing (review count, star rating, whether a website is linked, hours, primary and secondary categories, city and state), remove duplicates by Google place ID, and compute the statistics. Nothing behind a login is touched and no reviewer names or personal details are stored. The set currently holds 70,441 listings across 51 states and is rebuilt monthly.
Two honest caveats. Collection at this scale produces errors, so read every figure as accurate within a point or two rather than to the decimal. And this trade shares Google categories with general repair: 3% of the listings carry no rating at all, and some listings that call themselves body shops do more mechanical work than collision work. The medians are still the best public picture of the field that exists.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No vendor, jobber, paint line, management system or estimating platform can buy a mention here.
- Every number is sourced, either to our dataset or to a primary source such as Google's own documentation. Opinion is labeled as opinion.
- Guides get written for an owner who is also writing estimates. If a step cannot be done by that owner or handed to a service writer, it does not go in.
- We do not publish claims about insurer behavior we cannot document. Where state rules on steering and the right to choose a shop vary, we say so and point you at your own state.
- Guides are dated and updated when the platforms change.
How the free trial works
This site is funded by the marketing work we do for shops. Every service is offered as a free 14-day trial because an owner should watch the phone ring before paying anyone. You text or call, say which service you want to try (Google Ads, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google profile work, a website, social, review generation, missed-call text-back, email and SMS, bookkeeping, or appointment setting), and we build it inside your own accounts, usually within 48 hours of the setup call. It runs 14 days. No card on file, nothing renews. Afterward you keep it at a price quoted before it started, switch services, or stop.
Text or call (385) 832-6175, or use the free trial page.