AutoTrader does more checking for you than any other place you'll find a used car, and it still leaves the most useful half of the job undone. Knowing exactly where their checking stops is what makes the difference between a wasted Saturday and a good buy.
So here's what the site does for you before you've lifted a finger, and what's left for you to do.
Does AutoTrader check the cars it lists?
Yes. Every vehicle listed on AutoTrader carries a free five-point check, and the result shows on the advert itself.
That's worth saying plainly, because plenty of buying guides imply that classified sites do nothing at all. This one does, it costs you nothing, and it's more than you get anywhere a private seller can post freely. If you're coming to AutoTrader from Facebook Marketplace, you're starting from a much better place.
What does AutoTrader's free car check actually cover?
Five records, all of them the kind that end a purchase on the spot. As listed on their own vehicle check page in August 2026, the free check covers whether the car has been stolen, scrapped, written off, imported or exported.
| What the free check covers | What it doesn't |
|---|---|
| Stolen markers | Outstanding finance (that's in their paid check) |
| Scrapped records | The MOT advisory history, and what it's been repeating |
| Insurance write-off records | Anything the advert itself says or avoids saying |
| Imported | Whether this model has a known expensive fault |
| Exported | What all of it means when you put it together |
The five it does are the right five to do first. They're the outcomes with no recovery: you can negotiate on a tired clutch, and you can't negotiate your way out of buying a stolen car. The gap is everything that needs reading rather than looking up.
What is the advert not telling you?
Paste the advert text and the registration. We read it against the car's DVSA MOT history and our known-faults database, then tell you what the seller left out.
Check an advert now (free) →Is the AutoTrader vehicle check worth paying for?
If you want the outstanding finance answer and you're buying that day, yes, and it's honest about what it is. Their full check was £5.95 when we looked in August 2026, with a £30,000 data guarantee, and it adds outstanding finance, mileage history and colour changes to the free five.
Two things worth knowing before you buy one. The first is that their own page describes it as a "26-point Vehicle Check" in one place and a "27 point independent report" in another, so treat the point count as marketing rather than a specification and judge it on the records it names.
The second is more useful: no provenance check anywhere sells better data than another one. Finance comes from the lenders, theft markers from the police, write-off records from the insurance industry, and every provider in the country draws on those same registers. HPI publishes its source list, and both the RAC and the AA say on their own sites that HPI supplies their checks. So the question isn't whose data is better, because it's the same data. It's what gets done with it. What an HPI check won't tell you goes through the six things none of them can answer, at any price.
Are you buying from a dealer or a private seller?
Check the listing, because it changes your legal position completely and almost nobody mentions it. AutoTrader carries both, and the advert says which.
Buy from a trader and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies. The car has to be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described, and you get a short-term right to reject it: 30 days from the day you take delivery, for a full refund, if it doesn't meet that standard. Buy privately and you get almost none of that. A private seller only has to describe the car honestly. If it's accurately described and then breaks, that's your problem.
That's also why the advert matters more on a dealer listing than people assume. A dealer writes adverts for a living. What they choose to leave out is a decision, not an oversight.
What should you check in an AutoTrader advert yourself?
The things that aren't records: what the advert claims, what it carefully doesn't claim, and whether the price fits the story.
- "HPI clear" or "fully checked" with no detail. It's not a lie, and it's not an answer either. Ask which check, run on what date, and ask to see it.
- Service history described in adjectives. "Well maintained" and "lovingly cared for" are not "full service history with stamps". If a car genuinely has the paperwork, the advert says so plainly, because it's worth money. Our guide to buying a car with no service history covers what the gap is actually worth in negotiation.
- A price noticeably under the others. Sometimes it's a quick sale. More often something in the description explains it and you haven't found it yet.
- Photos that avoid a corner of the car. Eight interior shots and nothing of the offside rear is a choice.
- Spec claims you can check. Trim levels, engine sizes and colours are all verifiable against the DVLA record, and getting one wrong is either carelessness or a different car.
The wordings that reliably precede a problem are worth learning properly, and we've written them up in advert phrases that should worry you.
How do you check the MOT history of an AutoTrader car?
Get the registration, then put it into the DVSA's free MOT history service. It gives you every test, the mileage recorded at each one, and every failure and advisory.
Trade listings don't always show the registration on the advert, so ask for it. A dealer will give it to you without hesitating, because they run checks on their own stock and they know you'll run one too. A dealer who won't hand over a reg is telling you something no database will.
Read the advisories as a sequence rather than a list. The same item flagged three years running is a job nobody has done, and on a dealer car it's a job that's about to become yours. Then read the mileage the same way: the pattern that catches a clocked car isn't a reading that goes backwards, it's heavy annual mileage that suddenly flattens just before the sale, which how to spot a clocked car walks through properly.
It's also worth knowing what tends to go wrong with the specific car before you go and look at one, because an advisory means something different on a model with a known weakness there. We keep a page per model: Nissan Qashqai known faults, Ford Kuga known faults and BMW 3 Series known faults are common enough on dealer forecourts to be a sensible place to start.
What's the quickest way to check a whole AutoTrader advert?
Copy the advert text, paste it in with the registration, and get the advert and the official records read against each other in one go.
Copying the text is the fast route. Select the description on the listing and copy it, then paste it in along with the reg. You're handing over the dealer's exact wording, which is the thing worth analysing, rather than retyping the highlights and losing the phrasing.
Screenshots work too, and they're the answer when you'd rather not fiddle with selecting text on a phone. Capture the description, the photos, the price and the seller details, then upload the lot. The advert text gets read out of the images, and if the number plate is legible in a photo of the car, the registration comes off that too.
What won't work is pasting the AutoTrader link. AutoTrader protects its listings with a Cloudflare challenge, which is ordinary anti-bot behaviour for a site that size, and the effect is that no third-party tool can read an advert from its URL. Ours can't either, and anything claiming to is guessing from the web address. Gumtree and eBay links can be read that way. AutoTrader can't, and neither can Facebook Marketplace, which is why checking a Facebook Marketplace advert uses the same two routes.
Which of these gaps can a check actually close?
Take AutoTrader's free five-point check first, because it's free and it's already done. It rules out the disasters of record, and on that ground we're not offering you anything better: our provenance data comes from the same registers as theirs, as it does for every provider.
What nothing on that advert page does is read the advert. That's the gap, and it's a structural one rather than an oversight, because a check runs on a registration and an advert isn't filed against a registration. Nobody has ever collected them. It's also the only part of a used car sale written by the person who wants your money, which makes it the most revealing document in the transaction and the only one nobody screens.
Our free scan takes the advert text and reads it against the DVSA MOT history for that plate: what the seller claims, what the record shows, and where the two disagree. Three former keepers, a corrosion advisory two years running and a description that mentions everything except the service history are three unremarkable facts apart and a fairly specific story together. Doing that reading is the job, and a list of records can't do it however many points it has.
It draws on three inputs no vehicle check takes: the advert text, the full DVSA advisory history read as a sequence, and a known-faults database covering 41 makes, with 228 documented faults and 616 advert phrases that tend to show up alongside them. On a dealer car that last one is the negotiating position, because a known fault with a known repair cost is a number you can put on the table.
If you want the finance answer as well, you've got two decent options and one of them isn't ours: AutoTrader's own paid check covers it on their listings, and our Provenance Check covers it with the finance, theft and write-off records folded into the risk score rather than listed underneath. Either way, starting with the free scan costs nothing and a free report upgrades on the same link with nothing to re-run.
What none of this can tell you
Unrecorded accident damage. The quality of a repair. Whether the car was driven hard from cold every morning of its life. Whether that advisory was fixed properly or fixed cheaply.
None of it is in any database at any price, ours included, because nobody ever filed it. Every check on the market is a search of records other people created, and a car repaired without an insurance claim leaves nothing behind for anyone to find.
So use the checks to decide which cars are worth driving to, which is what they're genuinely good for. Then go and look at the one that survives, take it for a proper drive rather than a lap of the industrial estate, and remember that on a dealer car you've got 30 days and a legal standard behind you if it turns out to be less than it was described as.
