How results are ranked
Last updated September 8, 2026
When you sort by anything — price, mileage, year, power, newest — the order is exactly that column, and nothing moves anything. This page is about the one ordering that is not a column: “Best match”, which is what you see before you choose a sort.
Best match is three numbers
Every listing gets a score between 0 and 1, and the list is that score, highest first. Three things go into it and nothing else:
| Part | Weight | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| How complete the advert is | 50% | A score out of 100 the seller can see and improve while writing. |
| How the price compares to the market | 30% | Where the asking price sits against what similar cars actually list for. |
| How recently it was published | 20% | A decay, not a cliff: a car loses about half of this part in its first ten days and then falls away slowly. |
How completeness is scored
Out of 100, from the things a seller controls:
| What the seller does | Points |
|---|---|
| Photographs — how many | 18 |
| Photographs — covering the angles we ask for | 12 |
| The fields buyers filter on, filled in | 16 |
| The optional fields, filled in | 9 |
| A description that says something | 14 |
| Service history stated | 8 |
| Damage disclosed, one way or the other | 8 |
| VIN given | 7 |
| An inspection report attached | 5 |
| VIN decoded against the manufacturer's data | 3 |
A category with no such field simply drops that row, which is how the same scorer handles a van or a motorcycle. Two other things are worth saying about the list. Disclosing damage scores the same as disclosing that there is none — the points are for answering, not for the answer, so an honest seller is never penalised for honesty. And a description is scored for carrying information, not for length: a wall of repeated words scores as an empty box.
What is not in the ranking
- Nothing the seller pays for changes the order of any sort but this one. Where a promoted advert appears in a price sort is its true position, always.
- We do not rank by how much a car costs. A cheap car and an expensive one with the same three numbers above sit in the same place.
- We do not rank by who the seller is. A dealer and a private seller are scored identically.
- We do not rank by how often somebody's adverts have been clicked in the past.
- Nobody can pay to be excluded from a competitor's results, because there is no such mechanism.
Promotion
A seller can pay to promote an advert. A promoted advert is marked as promoted wherever it appears, and it can only be lifted within “Best match”. Every other sort is untouched: if you sort by price, you are looking at prices in order, and no money changed that.
When this changes
The three weights above are constants in the code and are covered by tests that fail if they drift. When they change, this page changes in the same release.