Long story short, my dad is in the market for a car and asked that I help him track down a good deal for a reliable cross-over. A brief conversation with AI suggests that the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 are the top most reliable in the class. So, I started looking on AutoTrader.com for some local options.
There’s a lot out there to sift through here! 😬
Naturally, I decided to employ some automations to make the job easier.
What is a bookmarklet?
A bookmarklet is a TINY JS script, embedded in an HTML link, that executes in the current page context when you click it.
<a href="javascript:(function(){alert("hello!")})()"> Click Me!! </a>Here try it 👉 Click Me!!
The other cool part is that you can click/drag that link into your bookmarklets bar and run it in the context of ANY WEB PAGE!
You can do a TON of cool stuff with that. For instance I built an entire workflow for cold outreach (marketing) on X.com. You can check that out here: https://snovak.com/2025/01/07/ai-assisted-cold-sales-on-x-com/
Scraping AutoTrader’s listings into a usable format.
The workflow is simple.
- Go to AutoTrader
- Search and setup filters for the car(s) you’re interested in
- Click the bookmarklet
- Paste into a spreadsheet or an AI chat
- Have your way with the data!
The listings are copied as CSV (comma separated values), which works pretty much every where. Paste it into a spreadsheet allows you to sort by the various columns. Or you can paste it into an AI chat and have it pick one for you.
I even wrote a dealFinder.js script, which runs an algorithm against the results. Assigning weights to the price, miles, vehicle trim to identify some of the best deals. Seems to work well!
You can download and try the script at: https://github.com/snovak/autotrader-listing-scraper-bookmarklet