Put one plain text file on your website and LotClock reads that instead of your inventory pages. One request a night instead of forty, nothing guessed from your markup, and a free report on your own lot in return.
LotClock reads dealership inventory pages to measure how the southeastern Michigan used-car market is priced and how fast it moves. Reading pages works, but it is the clumsy way round: it costs your server dozens of requests, it infers things from your page structure that it could simply be told, and it breaks every time your website vendor changes a template.
A feed fixes all three. It also settles the question of intent, which is the part that actually matters — nobody has to wonder whether reading your website was welcome, because the file exists to be read.
A free report on your own inventory: what each of your vehicles is asking against comparable listings within 20 miles, and how long the slow ones have been sitting. Yours free, for as long as the feed is up. The market-wide view and the history are the paid product; your own lot is not.
/inventory.mdPlain text. One line per vehicle. Anything your website software can generate on a schedule will do — this is the whole format:
# Current Inventory Dealer: Your Dealership Last updated: 2026-09-04T09:19:05.871Z Total vehicles in stock: 57 - [2022 Ford F-150 XLT (Stock #am250636)](https://example.com/2022-ford-f-150-xlt-1FTEW1EP0NFB49142) - Pre-owned · $34,995 · 35,371 miles - [2019 Honda CR-V EX (Stock #hp119043)](https://example.com/2019-honda-cr-v-ex-2HKRW2H85KH612884) - Pre-owned · $21,450 · 62,118 miles
The VIN is read from the end of the link, so the link has to end in it. Everything else on the line is optional: a car with no price is still read, it just cannot be compared to anything until it has one.
/llms.txtA one-line pointer, so nothing has to go looking:
# Your Dealership Inventory: https://example.com/inventory.md
robots.txtThis is the part that makes it an invitation rather than a guess:
User-agent: LotClock Allow: / Crawl-delay: 1
Then email hello@lotclock.io and we will switch your rooftop over to reading the file. If your website is on a platform that currently blocks us — Carsforsale, Dealer Inspire and Team Velocity all refuse an honest crawler — this is the only way we can read you at all.
Most dealer management systems can already export inventory as a spreadsheet on a schedule. Point that export at a URL on your website and we will read it. The only column that matters is the VIN — everything else is optional and improves what we can say:
Stock #,VIN,Year,Make,Model,Trim,Mileage,Internet Price,URL A1001,1FTEW1EP0NFB49142,2022,Ford,F-150,XLT,"35,371","$34,995",https://example.com/a A1002,2HKRW2H85KH612884,2019,Honda,CR-V,EX,62118,21450,https://example.com/b
Column names are matched loosely, so Price, Sale Price,
Internet Price and Our Price all work, as do Mileage,
Odometer and Miles. Quoted commas, dollar signs and cents are handled. A
vehicle with no price is still read; it simply cannot be compared to anything until it has one.
No, and nothing about the feed changes what is stored. LotClock keeps facts — VIN, price, mileage, and the dates it appeared and disappeared. Never your photographs, never your written descriptions, never a customer's details. Every comparable vehicle it shows names the dealership it came from and links to that dealership's own page.
Your asking prices are already public on your own website; that is what makes a market measurable. What a feed changes is accuracy, not exposure — a car read from a feed is read correctly, with its real price rather than a number inferred from a template.
Delete the file, or block the crawler in robots.txt, and it stops. There is no account to cancel. See about the crawler for the one line that stops it entirely.
Most vendors will add a static file on request; it is a smaller ask than it sounds, and the format above is short enough to forward as-is. But you may not need them at all — see the CSV below, which most dealer management systems can already export on a schedule. If neither is possible, email hello@lotclock.io and we will work out something that fits what your systems actually produce.
Without being asked, and before this page existed. Their feeds are read in one request a night, and they are the most complete rooftops in the archive: nearly every car they list carries a price, where the weakest platform manages barely a third. The coverage page shows where every rooftop stands, updated by the crawler itself.