What we check, and what we don't

Our checks are about whether the advert is real — a genuine dealer, a genuine car, genuine photos of that car, at a plausible price. They are not about whether the seller’s description of the vehicle is true. Those are different questions and we keep them apart everywhere on the site.

A listing that fails any of these is held back or quarantined. It is never published with the failure hidden or averaged away.

• Source permission. The dealer’s site must be on our approved source register, its terms must permit indexing, and its robots rules must allow the specific page. Photos and description text each carry their own rights status; a listing without both cannot be published.
• Complete, structured facts. Make, model, variant, year, price, mileage, body type, fuel, gearbox and drivetrain must all be present and must match our strict vocabularies. Placeholder text (“n/a”, “unknown”) is rejected, not accepted. Price, year and mileage must fall inside sane ranges. The make and model must resolve to a real entry in our catalogue.
• At least one photo of that specific car. The listing must carry the vehicle’s registration or the dealer’s own stock number, so every image we keep is scoped to that one vehicle. Stock library shots, logos, thumbnails and any image whose filename carries a different registration are stripped out. Each surviving image must clear an automated integrity floor — it has to fetch, and it has to be a real full-size photograph rather than a placeholder — and the audit must finish with nothing failed and nothing pending before the listing goes live. That floor is not a per-image check that the car in the picture is the car in the advert. Where we have not established that, the listing says so on its own page and we never mark the photographs as verified.
• A real, locatable seller. Exact address, valid UK postcode, town, and a phone number that matches the source page. Coordinates must be genuine and inside the UK. Coordinates derived from a postcode lookup, a town centroid or any approximation are rejected outright — we would rather show no map pin than a fake one.
• Anti-fraud checks. We look for the same advert, the same registration, the same source URL or the same photographs appearing under a different seller, and for inconsistencies between the dealer details we hold and the ones on the page. Any hit holds the listing.
• Anti-scam checks. The link must be secure and must not redirect off the dealer’s own domain. Where we hold enough comparable cars, we compare the asking price against their median: far below it is treated as bait and held, moderately below it goes to review. We never treat an unexplained low price as a bargain.
• Duplicate registration. The same registration live under another seller holds the listing.

These are enforced in three places at once — in the import code, in database constraints, and in a dry-run-then-apply check that refuses to publish if anything changed in between. A listing that slips past one layer is caught by the next and forced back into the queue.

This is the important half, and we would rather state it plainly than let the word “verified” do quiet work. For catalogue listings imported from dealer websites — which today is every car on the site — we do not:

• match the registration, make, model or specification against the DVLA record;
• retrieve or check MOT history from DVSA;
• cross-check the advertised mileage against any odometer reading;
• check for outstanding finance, theft markers or write-off category.

None of those checks runs on this path, so none of those facts is ever shown as confirmed. Every vehicle fact on an imported listing is recorded as stated by the seller, and the card says so. Treat it as the dealer’s claim, because that is exactly what it is.

• Confirmed means we reached an official source and the displayed value matched it. No imported catalogue listing currently carries this on any vehicle fact.
• Seller stated means the seller supplied the value and we show that provenance beside it.
• Not checked means no successful official comparison is available. It means unknown. It does not mean clear, and it should never be read as reassurance.

Our free registration check is a separate service: you enter a plate and we query the official record directly, then show you field by field what came back and what did not. Dealers who add stock to us by hand go through a different, stricter gate that requires official evidence before publishing, and holds the listing when that evidence is unavailable rather than publishing it anyway.

Neither of those routes changes an imported listing retrospectively. If we later connect official evidence to a catalogue car, the label changes then and not before.

Source data changes. We re-read dealer pages and record when each listing was last seen; a listing we can no longer find on the dealer’s site expires rather than lingering. Photo, seller and anti-fraud checks are re-run on update, and a listing that stops passing returns to review instead of keeping a status it no longer earns.

Our checks are a point-in-time look at the advert and the seller. They are not a mechanical inspection, not a guarantee of condition, title or roadworthiness, and not a substitute for seeing the car. Before you pay anything, view the vehicle, check the V5C against the seller’s address, and buy a full provenance check.