Car prices are public. Finding them should not be work.

Every dealership publishes its inventory and prices on its own website. The information is public, but it is scattered across thousands of sites, and none of them will tell you what the car cost last week. The Motor Standard gathers those published prices into one open index and keeps the history.

Where the data comes from

Dealer websites embed machine-readable descriptions of their vehicles in their inventory pages, using the schema.org vocabulary, so that search engines can understand them. We read that same data: VIN, year, make, model, trim, mileage, colors, the advertised price, and the selling store.

• We identify ourselves. Our crawler announces itself as OpenLotBot. It never pretends to be a browser.
• We follow each site's rules. We read robots.txt first, stay out of anything it disallows, and wait at least as long between requests as the site asks.
• We take no for an answer. If a site blocks automated visitors, we stop. We do not work around bot protection, logins, or rate limits.
• We send people back. Every listing links to the dealer's own page. Photos load from the dealer's servers; we do not copy them.

What the numbers mean

• Price is the dealer's advertised price the last time we read the page. It normally excludes tax, title, registration, and dealer fees, and it can depend on conditions in the dealer's fine print.
• Price history starts the day we first saw the listing. A car may have been for sale before that.
• Days listed counts from our first sighting, not from when the dealer acquired the car.
• Removed means the car was no longer on the dealer's site after a complete read of its inventory. Usually sold; sometimes moved or withdrawn.
• Market figures (medians and ranges) describe asking prices among the dealers we read. They are not sale prices and not a national average.

Body style comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public VIN decoder. Everything else is as the dealer published it, so mistakes on the dealer's page will appear here too. Always confirm price and availability with the dealer.

Free, with no paid placement

Price transparency helps buyers and honest dealers alike. The index is free to search, and we accept no payment for placement: there are no sponsored listings and no promoted dealers.

We pay for it with the concierge service, where a person handles the purchase for buyers who would rather not. Using the index never requires it.

For dealers

If your dealership is listed, we are sending you shoppers for free, with a direct link to your vehicle page. You are in control:

• Remove your listings. Ask below and we will stop reading your site and delete your listings. You can also disallow OpenLotBot in your robots.txt and we will obey it on the next visit.
• Correct something. We mirror your published data, so fixing your own page fixes ours on the next read. If we have misread it, tell us.
• Claim your profile. Open your dealership from the dealer list and choose “Claim this profile” to add a description, contact details and hours, and show a verified badge. A claim never changes prices or price history.
• Get added. If you publish prices openly and want to be included, send your website.

Corrections and contact

Found an error in a guide or a listing, or want something you sent us deleted? Use the form. A person reads every message.