AutoTrader Scraper — car listings, price, mileage and dealer

This Actor scrapes AutoTrader vehicle listings in the United States (autotrader.com) and the United Kingdom (autotrader.co.uk). Give the AutoTrader Scraper a ZIP code, a UK postcode or a full AutoTrader search URL and it returns up to 100 US listings per search with year, make, model, trim, numeric price, mileage, VIN and the selling dealer.

No AutoTrader account, login or cookies are used — this reads what a logged-out visitor sees. Paid spotlight and boost placements are excluded from US results, so a row is an answer to the search rather than an advert.

What it returns

Field	Type	Notes
listingId	string	AutoTrader's own listing ID — stable across runs, use it to de-duplicate
title	string	e.g. "New 2026 Hyundai Santa Fe SEL"
year	number
make, model, trim	string	Split, not one blob
price	number	43413, not "$43,413". UK prices are the total including fees
priceText	string	The formatted price, or the dealer's own label when no price is published
mileage	number	Numeric, e.g. 126431
vin	string	US listings only
bodyStyle	string	US listings only, e.g. Sport Utility
fuelType	string	US listings only, e.g. Gasoline
transmission	string	US listings only, e.g. Automatic
dealerName	string	The selling dealer
city	string	Dealer city (US) or vehicle location (UK)
state	string	US listings only
detailUrl	string	Link to the AutoTrader listing page
sourceUrl, collectedAt	string	Provenance for every row

autotrader.com and autotrader.co.uk are separate products sharing a brand, and their result data differs. UK rows carry listingId, title, year, make, model, trim, price, priceText, mileage, dealerName, city and detailUrl; vin, bodyStyle, fuelType, transmission and state are null on UK rows because the UK results API does not return them.

Input

{ "searches": ["78701", "https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/all-cars?zip=10001"], "market": "us" }

Field	Description
searches	US ZIP codes, UK postcodes, or full AutoTrader search URLs. Required, 1–100.
market	us (default) for autotrader.com or uk for autotrader.co.uk.
maxItems	Cap on dataset items. Default 1000. Free plans stop at 250 requests and 250 results — see below.
concurrency	Searches run in parallel. Default 5, maximum 10.

A bare US ZIP code searches all cars within 50 miles and asks for 100 records — the most one autotrader.com results page serves. A bare UK postcode searches from that postcode. Pass a full search URL instead to keep the filters you built on the site: for the UK market, postcode, make, model, radius, price-from, price-to, year-from, year-to, minimum-mileage, maximum-mileage, fuel-type, body-type, transmission, colour, doors, seller-type, sort and page are carried through.

Use cases

• Used-car pricing and market analysis by make, model, trim and mileage band
• Dealer inventory monitoring — which cars a dealership is listing, and at what price
• Building a VIN-keyed dataset of US listings for valuation or history work
• Lead lists of dealerships by market, from dealerName, city and state
• Tracking price drops and days on the lot by re-running a search on a schedule

Reliability

The AutoTrader Scraper reads the US market from the search page's own hydrated state — the same listing objects AutoTrader's private listing API returns — so prices, mileages and VINs are exact values rather than card text. The UK market ships an empty document and calls a GraphQL gateway from the browser, so the AutoTrader Scraper calls that gateway directly and takes only natural listings, leaving adverts out of the result set.

A search that cannot be read is recorded in the run's SUMMARY under failures rather than silently returning fewer rows, and a run where every search failed exits with an error.

There are no retries by design: the String Unblocker owns proxy rotation and anti-bot solver selection, so a retry loop here would only re-roll the same block.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an AutoTrader account, API key or cookies? No. The AutoTrader Scraper reads public search results as a logged-out visitor, and never signs in.

Which countries does the AutoTrader Scraper support? The United States and the United Kingdom, selected with the market field. autotrader.com and autotrader.co.uk are the only sites read.

How many listings does one search return? Up to 100 in the US market, which is the maximum one autotrader.com results page serves. The UK market returns one page of gateway results per search; add page=2 to a UK search URL to read the next page.

Does every listing have a VIN? US listings carry vin when AutoTrader publishes it. UK listings never do — the UK results API returns no VIN, fuel type, transmission or body style.

Are sponsored listings included? No. The US market takes only the active search results, so spotlight and boost placements — which are paid slots rather than answers to your search — are left out.

Why does a row have priceText but no price? Because the dealer publishes no price. priceText then carries the dealer's own label, such as "Contact Dealer For Price".

Limitations

Search results only: vehicle history reports, photo sets, full option and feature lists, seller phone numbers and financing terms are out of scope. One results page per search, so run several narrower searches — by make, model or price band — to widen coverage. UK rows omit VIN, body style, fuel type and transmission, and only autotrader.com and autotrader.co.uk URLs are accepted.

Free plan limit

Runs started from an Apify free plan stop at 250 requests and 250 results, and the run reports that it reached the limit. Any paid plan runs the full input and maxItems you set.

The limit exists because this Actor fetches through our own infrastructure, which Apify does not cover for free-plan runs. It binds on requests as well as results so that a large input list cannot spend those fetches for rows the run will not return.