Our strategy
in action
Bringing together our three strategic priorities to deliver the best,
data-driven digital retailing experience for consumers and retailers, alike.
Our three strategic priorities
are enabling future-focused,
data-driven digital retailing
We strive to be the best place to find, buy and sell a
car in the UK — on a platform that enables data-driven
digital retailing for our customers. These three strategic
priorities sit alongside our commitment to always being
a responsible business.
Marketplace
Be the best place
to buy and sell a car
Our marketplace delivered robust revenue and operating profit growth during the year. Our marketplace business grows reasonably consistently between mid and high single digits. When stock is in tighter supply or when market conditions mean that retailer profitability is particularly challenged, revenue is typically at the lower end of this range. This year we saw a gradual rise in used car supply relative to last year, which was met with increasing levels of used car demand, resulting in used car transaction growth of 4% year-on-year.
Significant new car marketing campaign
During the year we launched an extensive new car marketing campaign. We have recently complemented the advertising of Franchise retailers’ new car stock, with direct listings from manufacturers and increased new car leasing deals through our acquisition of Autorama. The campaign was aimed at increasing consumer awareness of this broader new car offering now available on Auto Trader. The media investment was across a number of channels including broadcast and digital. We’ve seen increased engagement with new car content as we’ve moved through the year, demonstrating the success of the campaign. This marketing has also been supported by our partnership with WhatCar? and our continued EV giveaway. We will continue marketing new cars into the next financial year, with the aim of targeting a younger audience.
1.8m
people viewing a new vehicle on Auto Trader each month during 2025
Platform
Be the industry’s data
and technology platform
We continue to see strong adoption amongst retailers and other industry players of our platform capabilities, data, tools and technology services. Many retailers gain access to these products through our Retailer Portal as their primary stock management system, but for larger or more complex retailers they integrate these services into their own systems. We see high engagement once customers integrate either directly or through their technology partners, as the data and services are embedded into their own systems and processes.
Long-term investment in data science
For much of the past 10 years, we have been building our data science team and working with machine learning and artificial intelligence (‘AI’). These models underpin most of the metrics we provide to our customers and car buyers, including price flags, valuations, advertising performance, retail demand and supply and our search algorithm. We have been experimenting with the latest generation of large language models (‘LLMs’) and see great potential to leverage this technology combined with our unique, proprietary dataset to make the lives of our retailers easier and to improve the experience for buyers on Auto Trader.
91m
API calls per month on average during 2025 (2024: 86m)
Digital retailing
Be the enabler for all
retailers to sell online
Retailers and their physical stores will continue to play a critical role in the car buying and retailing process for many years to come, as most consumers are not comfortable buying a car entirely online. There is a desire to inspect, test drive and gain support from people throughout the process. However, we do believe the process can be improved by enabling more of the journey to be done online, at a time convenient for car buyers before they visit the forecourt. This also benefits our customers as a large amount of resource
is allocated to managing enquiries and processing paperwork that does not ultimately result in a sale and therefore impacts their bottom line.
New car leasing check-out available on Auto Trader
In parallel to Deal Builder, we are working to enable a digital retailing journey for new cars. Throughout the period we have further integrated leasing deals for cars, vans and pickups into the core Auto Trader search experience. Our car leasing tab consolidates all available deals and provides a full checkout journey on Auto Trader. The personal leasing market has been constrained by tight supply, but in time, as fleets ‘catch-up’ on orders not fulfilled over the past four years we expect supply through this channel to gradually improve.
Find out more about how we're helping consumers and
retailers adapt to this quickly evolving landscape and
embrace the exciting changes on the horizon.
c.2,000
Deal Builder customers live in
March 2025
c.49,000
deals in March 2025
c.84,000
cars live at the end of March 2025
Working responsibly
Be a responsible business
Our ESG strategy is underpinned by our purpose of Driving Change Together. Responsibly.
This ensures we strive to make a positive difference to our people, our communities, the industries we operate in, and the wider environment to create a more accessible, equitable and sustainable future.
Digital & Technology Sector toolkit
In 2024 we launched our new Digital & Technology Sector toolkit, in partnership with Manchester Digital, in our head office to a full room of engaged and passionate people. We’ve had positive engagement with the toolkit since launch and we’re now looking forward to expanding the reach of the project. The work has also been recognised by sustainability title edie and they’ve written a case study about the project.
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