LOTCLOCK

What LotClock reads, and what it cannot see.

Generated from the archive itself on 2026-09-04, not typed by hand. If a number here looks small, it is small.

By county

A county with few vehicles is a county where LotClock will refuse to answer. It does not widen the search to fill a gap.

The market is southeastern Michigan — the first eight counties above. The handful of vehicles listed further afield arrive through dealer groups that publish every store's stock on one website; each car is recorded at the store it is actually standing on rather than at the group's head office, which is why a few land several hundred miles away. They are counted here because they are really there, and they never appear as a comparable for a car down here, because twenty miles is twenty miles.

Platforms

Two dealerships publish a feed on purpose — a /llms.txt and an /inventory.md, with our crawler named in their robots.txt. That is the friendliest version of this: one request instead of a page-by-page walk, nothing inferred from markup, and nobody guessing at anyone's intent. Here is how to publish one — it is one plain text file, and a free report on your own lot in return.

243 of the 578 dealerships identified run a platform that refuses an honest crawler. Their robots.txt often grants permission while the server in front of it does not; where the two disagree, LotClock obeys the stricter one and those stores are simply absent. 28 more have not been checked yet.

How to be excluded

One line in your robots.txt stops LotClock permanently, and the crawler page sets out exactly what is collected and what never is — no photographs, no written descriptions, no personal information.