MBUSA Dealer Website Providers
mbusa-dealer-website-providers.json classifies every MBUSA franchise dealer to the
platform vendor that serves its website and new-inventory SRP. It is the work list for
deciding which dealer-site collectors in ai_public are worth building: a vendor's row
count is the number of MBUSA dealers one collector reaches.
Snapshot taken 2026-08-20 from the same dealer list the ai_mercedes raw dealers asset
fetches (nafta-service.mbusa.com/api/dlrsrv/v1/us/search, filter=mbdealer): 387
dealers, all with a 5-digit oem_dealer_id that joins to dealer_code in
("mercedes", "mbusa", *, "dealers").
Distribution
| provider | dealers |
|---|---|
| Dealer.com (Cox) | 158 |
| Dealer Inspire (Cars.com) | 157 |
| DealerOn | 35 |
| Motive (RideMotive) | 13 |
| Team Velocity | 10 |
| Dealer eProcess | 5 |
| DealerFire (DealerSocket) | 3 |
| Fox Dealer | 2 |
| Space Auto | 1 |
| Remora | 1 |
| Dealer Alchemist | 1 |
| DealerTower | 1 |
Two vendors cover 81% of the network.
Row structure
| field | meaning |
|---|---|
oem_dealer_id | 5-digit MBUSA dealer code |
dealer_name | dealer name as the MBUSA API reports it |
website | dealer URL as the MBUSA API reports it; null for one dealer that has none |
provider | normalized platform vendor |
resolved_website | the site actually classified, where it differs from website (55 rows) |
inventory_url | new-inventory page reached, where one was reached (353 rows) |
evidence | channel plus the vendor markers that decided the row |
confidence | high when two independent channels agree or the SRP itself carried the markers; medium for single-channel |
Fingerprints that lie
Three signals look like platform evidence and are not. Each figure below is measured over the 387-dealer sweep.
*.mercedesdealer.comDNS. 183 dealers are listed under an MBUSA vanity host. Of the 129 whose CNAME names a recognizable vendor, the CNAME's vendor disagrees with the platform the page itself identifies for 28 — 22%. Three vendors appear as the CNAME target across those hosts: Dealer.com 74, Dealer Inspire 44, DealerFire 11. The target does not predict who serves the site. Burlington resolves into Dealer Inspire and runs DealerOn; Lynchburg resolves into Dealer.com and runs Dealer.com. Page content is the deciding signal; vanity-host DNS is discarded.- Shared redirect targets. 11 dealers CNAME to
765824-web10.dealerfire.comand none of them runs DealerFire (5 Dealer Inspire, 4 Dealer.com, 2 DealerOn).domains.dealer.comis the same kind of target, named by 74 vanity hosts. assets.prod.analytics.dealer.comis a Cox tracking pixel, not a platform marker. 47 fetched pages carry it and not one of them is a Dealer.com site — they are Dealer Inspire (41), Motive (4), and DealerTower (2). It is the onlydealer.comstring on the DealerTower site.
One signal looks misleading and is reliable: sincrowebId appears for 23 dealers, all
23 running DealerOn. In all 80 fetched pages carrying it, it sits inside a
dealeron_website_metadata block — a legacy Sincro identifier on a DealerOn site.
Fetching these sites
148 of 387 sites answer 403 to httpx. Retried with curl --http2 and a full Chrome
header set, 143 of those 148 returned 200. Restricting to the 71 where the retry hit the
identical hostname rather than following on to a corrected one, 66 returned 200. What
httpx sends that draws the 403 was not isolated — TLS and HTTP-version fingerprinting
is the hypothesis, untested.
Blocking is also intermittent: two Team Velocity hosts that served their homepage during
the sweep answered 403 to the same request a day later. Retry before concluding a host
is unreachable.
A few sites behind Cloudflare answer 200 with an empty body to any non-browser client;
those were classified from their real domain instead.
Stale dealer URLs
Three rows the MBUSA API gets wrong, worth correcting upstream:
| dealer | issue |
|---|---|
| 31123 Mercedes-Benz of Louisville | tafelmotors.com no longer belongs to the dealer and serves an unrelated gambling site; the dealer is at mblouisville.com |
| 22176 Mercedes-Benz of Sycamore | listed as Bemis Imports; kunesmercedes.com titles itself "Kunes Mercedes-Benz of Sycamore" and mentions Bemis nowhere |
| 70101 Mercedes-Benz of Ponce | no url in the API at all; the dealer is at mercedesbenzofponce.com |