Automotive Listings
Aggregating vehicle listings and pricing signals across dealer and marketplace sites.
The problem
Vehicle listings are split across dealer inventory sites, marketplaces, and classifieds, each with different data completeness (VIN, mileage, accident history often missing or inconsistent), so building a comprehensive price-comparison view means reconciling incomplete records from many sources rather than trusting one.
How the workflow is built
Make/model/trim queries scoped by location and price range run against dealer and marketplace domains, with VIN extraction used as the primary deduplication key where available since the same vehicle is frequently cross-posted across multiple sites under slightly different descriptions.
Example queries
"2022 Honda CR-V" for sale [city] under $28000site:cargurus.com "Toyota Tacoma" [zip code]certified pre-owned "[make model]" dealer inventory
Pitfalls to watch for
- VIN data isn't always present in a listing's indexed snippet even when it's on the actual page, so reliable deduplication often requires a page fetch, not just the search result text.
- Listing prices frequently don't include dealer fees, and the 'advertised' price surfaced in a search snippet can differ meaningfully from the actual out-the-door price a buyer would pay — this gap should be surfaced explicitly, not treated as the final number.
- Sold or pending vehicles often remain indexed and searchable for days after the listing is actually removed by the dealer, producing stale hits that need active freshness checking against the source page.