Carcharocles was named by Jordan (1923) [Sepkoski's age data: T Eo-m-l T Plio Sepkoski's reference number: 884,958]. It is not extant.

It was synonymized subjectively with Carcharodon by Gottfried et al. (1996); it was reranked as Otodus (Carcharocles) by Szabo et al. (2017), Ebersole et al. (2019) and Boessenecker et al. (2019).

It was assigned to Carcharodontidae by Jordan and Hanibal (1923); to Lamniformes by Sepkoski (2002); to Lamnidae by Jordan (1963), Long (1992) and Hastings and Dooley (2017); to Otodus by Szabo et al. (2017), Ebersole et al. (2019) and Boessenecker et al. (2019); and to Otodontidae by Yabe and Hirayama (1998), Antunes and Balbino (2003), Kocsis (2007), Cicimurri and Knight (2009), Pimiento et al. (2010), Otero et al. (2013), Carrillo-Briceño et al. (2016), Boessenecker (2016), Kent (2018) and Landini et al. (2019).