Auto Trader UK Scraper

Vehicle adverts from Auto Trader UK as a clean table. Give it a postcode and whatever filters you care about, and get one row per advert with the make and model, the trim, the price, where the vehicle is, how far away it is, whether the seller is a dealer or a private seller, and how many photos the advert has.

It covers the whole marketplace, not just cars. What to search switches between cars, vans, bikes, motorhomes, caravans, trucks, farm machinery and plant, and every one returns the same shape of row.

The postcode is not optional, and it is not just a filter

Every Auto Trader search is relative to a postcode, and that is what makes distance_miles mean anything. The same advert is 9 miles away from one postcode and 200 from another, so the distance belongs to your search rather than to the vehicle. location is where the vehicle actually is and does not change.

Add Radius in miles to bound the search geographically, or leave it out to search nationally and let the distance column tell you what is near.

Filters

All optional, and all of them narrow the search before anything is fetched rather than filtering afterwards, so a tight search is also a fast one:

• Make and Model, for example BMW and 3 Series
• Minimum and Maximum price, in pounds
• Earliest and Latest year of registration
• Fuel type, Body type, Transmission
• Radius in miles

What you get per advert

• title, subtitle, highlight — the model, the full trim line, and the seller's own attention-grabber when there is one
• price, price_text, rrp
• location, distance_miles
• seller_type, dealer_url — TRADE for a dealer, PRIVATE otherwise
• photo_count, is_pre_reg
• advert_id, url
• postcode, channel, search_page, position, result_count

price and price_text are both there on purpose. The text is exactly what the advert displays, including the currency; the number is for sorting and filtering. Where a price is not published, the number is null rather than zero.

result_count is how many adverts the search matched in total, which is far more than any run returns. A national BMW search reports over forty thousand. Having both numbers tells you what share you are holding.

Run sizes

Adverts arrive about thirteen to a page. Maximum adverts caps the run and Maximum pages is the rail: a broad national search runs to several thousand pages, so without it a run would try to walk the entire market.

Featured adverts repeat across pages. They are removed by advert id, which is why a page of thirteen sometimes contributes fewer than thirteen new rows.

Errors

Code	Meaning
bad_input	No postcode supplied
no_results	The search ran and matched nothing
search_failed	Auto Trader rejected the search, with its reason quoted

no_results and search_failed are deliberately different. A filter combination nobody is selling and a search that was refused look identical if you only count rows.

Related actors

For the US market, use Autotrader Scraper, which reads autotrader.com. The two sites are different companies and share nothing but a name, so the two actors are separate on purpose.