About LotProwl
LotProwl lists the cars and trucks on dealer websites in Texas by advertised price, cheapest first. It's free, with no account and no ads. LotProwl doesn't sell cars.
How it works
Nightly read
Every night, LotProwl visits each dealer website it can read and saves every vehicle on it with its advertised price.
Search
Pick a make and model, then narrow by price, year, miles, trim, region or distance. "Sierra" finds the Sierra 1500 and the heavy-duty trucks.
Go to the dealer
Each listing opens the dealer's own page. Check the price, fees and availability there before you go.
Which dealers it reads
LotProwl knows 598 new-car dealers in Texas and reads 121 of them. LotProwl reads each dealer's own website. Prices are the ones those websites show.
| Dealer website | Dealers | Read by LotProwl |
|---|---|---|
| Built by DealerOn | 85 | Yes |
| Built by Team Velocity | 36 | Yes |
| Built by Dealer.com | 155 | Not yet |
| Built by another company | 38 | Not yet |
| Blocks automated visitors | 238 | No |
| Didn't load when checked | 46 | No |
The dealer list under every search names each dealer and why LotProwl doesn't read it.
What it doesn't do yet
- The dealer list is still missing stores, mostly Ford, Chevrolet, Honda, Hyundai and Jeep.
- Used-car lots aren't included. You'll see the used cars that new-car dealers sell.
- Prices come from the last nightly read, so a car may have sold or changed price since.
- Dealers count fees differently. Some include the documentation fee in the price and some don't.
- Distances are straight-line miles to the dealer, not driving miles.
- It covers Texas only.
For dealers
LotProwl's crawler identifies itself as LotProwlBot. It reads robots.txt first and asks each site for at most one page every 10 seconds, or slower if your Crawl-delay says so. It saves each vehicle's name, VIN, price, mileage, page link and the link to its main photo. It doesn't copy photos or descriptions. Shoppers' browsers load each photo from your website, and every listing links to your vehicle page.
To keep LotProwl off your site, add these lines to robots.txt:
User-agent: LotProwlBot Disallow: /