About the LotClock crawler

LotClock reads publicly published vehicle listings from dealership websites in southeastern Michigan to measure how the local used-car market is priced and how quickly it moves. This page explains exactly what it does, what it will never do, and how to have your dealership excluded.

How to recognise it

Every request identifies itself. In your server logs it looks like this:

LotClock/0.1 (+https://lotclock.io/bot)

It does not pretend to be a web browser, and it does not use residential proxies, rotate addresses, or attempt to work around any blocking.

What it collects, and what it never touches

Collected — facts about the vehicle

VIN, year, make, model, trim as you wrote it
Asking price, and the date it changed
Odometer reading
Body style, drivetrain, colours, stock number
The date the vehicle appeared and disappeared
Your dealership name, address, and the link back to your own listing page

Never collected — not once

Photographs. Not stored, not copied, not displayed, not even as thumbnails
Your written vehicle descriptions or marketing copy
Any person's name, photo, direct line or email — no salespeople, no staff
Customer data of any kind

Why the distinction matters

Prices, mileages and VINs are facts. Your photographs and the descriptions your team writes are your creative work, and they are yours. LotClock is built to measure a market, not to reproduce anyone's listings — so it takes the numbers and leaves the rest.

How it behaves on your server

It reads robots.txt before anything else, and obeys it — including your Crawl-delay.
It only requests ordinary inventory pages, the same ones a shopper sees. It never requests internal endpoints, feeds or data files that your robots.txt excludes.
Requests are spaced out. A full read of a large lot is a few dozen page loads spread over minutes — less traffic than one person browsing your inventory.
It runs roughly once a day.
If your server refuses a request, that is final. The dealership is marked as permanently excluded and is never contacted again — no retries, and no attempt to get around the block.

Where the data goes

It is used to produce market statistics — how many comparable vehicles are listed nearby, how their prices are distributed, and how long a given specification typically stays on the market. Where an individual vehicle is shown for comparison, it is shown as a short factual row that names the dealership it came from and links to that dealership's own page.

LotClock does not resell your listings, does not republish your photographs or descriptions, and does not present itself as a place to shop for cars.

To have your dealership excluded

Email hello@lotclock.io with your website address and we will stop, and delete what has been collected from your site, within one business day. No explanation needed and nothing to justify.

You can also block it yourself at any time by adding this to your robots.txt — it is checked on every run and honoured permanently:

User-agent: LotClock
Disallow: /

Questions, corrections, or a problem

If something here does not match what you are seeing in your logs, or you think the crawler is behaving badly, please write to hello@lotclock.io. A person reads that address.