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Hi Mandi, I wouldn't sacrifice branding for the sake of ranking. Meaning, I wouldn't start incorporating signals around "AP Velocity" if the business names is APVelocity.

Is the business fairly new? Just might be one of those things that needs time. If you're seeing a lot of velocity around "AP Velocity," those people could also be searching for the Velocity Automotive Performance business that's currently ranking #1.

With branded terms, if a user is looking for you, they are more willing to wade through the SERPs. Meaning, if you are searching for Moz, you know you want the SEO expert, and not something like MOZ Designs. So, you'll look through the results until you find what you know you're looking for. Does that make sense?

Thus, if people are searching "AP Velocity," and they intend to find your business, their behavior in the SERPs will be a sign to Google that they should associate that term with your business, and not that of another (or not).

To confirm, it's a site you built? And when you had control over it (or upon building it), you pointed links back to your site? The report you're viewing might just need to be refreshed. Even so, if it's possible the links are still on the site or could reappear, and they're links you could say you placed yourself at one point, I'd disavow.

Q1: Easier said than done, but definitely worth the time to rewrite the "chunks," especially if they are descriptions. I can see if it's something like safety information, where you'd actually want it to be known it's coming from a trusted source. But, descriptions should be rewritable. If not, you probably don't want to pass the copy off as your own, so best to keep it separate and say something like "site XYZ has this to say..."

Also, if it can't be rewritten, gauge how much content is unique to each page, and consider what else can be written about the cars to help balance out the ratio of unique to copied content.

Q2: Make sure the dealer's website has self-referencing canonicals if that's the original source of the information.

Do we know if a quick copy paste from the lower 1/3 of the page into Google returned the page (and copied text) in question? Or, have you ever seen a case where the top portion is findable in the SERPs through a quick copy/paste of a portion of text, but text from the bottom doesn't return anything?

I've seen this happen, and don't really have a good answer for it. Seems like it could be along the same lines? I know Google can't index a portion of the page, but strange how when you copy a sentence from the top of a page with tons of lines of code, you can find it in the SERPs, but doing the same from the bottom yielded nothing.