Gumtree UK Scraper

Gumtree UK Scraper: classified ads by keyword, category, town or postcode, with contact details removed

Give it a search term, a category, UK towns or postcodes, or a Gumtree URL, and it returns one row per ad with the id, title, price, category, place, photos and link. Phone numbers and email addresses are stripped out of every field before a row is written. Search results carry no posted date and only a snippet of the ad text, so if you need either, turn on Open each listing page, which makes a run roughly ten times slower.

🔍 What Gumtree UK Scraper does

It reads the pages Gumtree shows a signed-out visitor, in one of two modes.

Search results only, the default, is fast: about 30 ads per page load. You get the id, title, price, town, the snippet Gumtree shows on the card, the thumbnail, the photo count and the link. On cars, vans and motorbikes the card also carries year, mileage, fuel, engine size and private or trade.

Open each listing page adds what only exists on the ad itself: the full text, the attribute table, seller type and name, the posted date, every photo and, on property ads, the postcode and map coordinates. A 50-listing run took 51 seconds with it on and about 4 with it off. Leave it off to watch a category for new ads, turn it on to build a dataset.

Sellers put their number and email in the ad body all the time, often disguised: name (at) example dot com, or a mobile broken up with spaces. Every string is scanned before it is written, and anything that looks like a phone number or an email address becomes [removed]. It errs on the side of removing too much. Prices, years, mileages, postcodes and ad ids are left alone. An audit of 451 delivered rows found no contact detail left, and the run log says how many it removed.

Paid "Featured" cards repeat at the top of every results page, so they are skipped unless you ask for them, and an ad is never returned twice in a run.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "ford focus",
  "location": ["leeds"],
  "category": ["cars"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "distanceMiles": 30,
  "sort": "date",
  "sellerType": "private",
  "fetchDetails": true
}

Or paste URLs and skip the form: {"searchUrls": ["https://www.gumtree.com/cars-vans-motorbikes/cars/uk/leeds"]}. Both the /search?... form and the browse path work. With nothing usable to search, the run writes one free sample row and stops.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a run on 30 September 2026, in the default mode, with the description cut short:

{
  "listingId": "1515177455",
  "title": "Marks & Spencer Cream Two-Seater Sofa",
  "price": 0,
  "priceText": "FREE",
  "currency": "GBP",
  "description": "Marks & Spencer two-seater sofa in cream fabric. 193cm long x 100cm deep\nStill functional and comfortable, good for a project or spare room. \nRear cor...",
  "descriptionIsTruncated": true,
  "categorySlug": "sofas-couches",
  "categoryName": null,
  "categoryPath": null,
  "location": "Banstead, Surrey",
  "postcode": null,
  "postcodeArea": null,
  "postcodeOutward": null,
  "latitude": null,
  "longitude": null,
  "sellerType": null,
  "sellerName": null,
  "condition": null,
  "postedAt": null,
  "postedText": null,
  "attributes": {},
  "images": ["https://img.gumtree.com/ePR8PyKf84wPHx7_RYmEag/4c196a6991b94dbfb3_991a3c916820/86"],
  "imageCount": 10,
  "isFeatured": false,
  "url": "https://www.gumtree.com/p/sofas-couches/marks-spencer-cream-two-seater-sofa/1515177455",
  "searchUrl": "https://www.gumtree.com/search?search_location=london&q=sofa&distance=30",
  "searchPage": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-30T02:27:39.016Z",
  "source": "search"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Real listings carry neither ok nor charged, while the sample row carries ok: true, so filtering on ok does not work. Drop rows with _sample or _diagnostic and what is left is the listings you paid for.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Gumtree UK Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Fill in Search terms and Location, or paste addresses into Gumtree search URLs. 3. Pick a Category if you want a price band or Posted by to narrow the search itself. 4. Set Maximum listings, and turn on Open each listing page if you need dates and the full text. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

The form arrives with sofa, london and 100 already filled in, so a run started without editing it is a real search.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.60 per 1,000 listings, flat on every Apify plan.

Not charged: the sample row, diagnostic rows, the Featured cards that are skipped, rows outside the price band you asked for, and repeats. Opening listing pages adds time, not charge. maxItems is the most listings a run can charge for.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching a category for new ads: sort set to date, a small maxItems, a schedule, and listingId to skip what

you already have.

• Checking what the thing you are about to sell is listed for nearby.
• Rental listings with postcodes and coordinates, from the property section with fetchDetails on.
• Seeing which dealers pay for Featured placements, with includeFeatured.

🚧 What it does not do

• No posted date in search mode. Gumtree does not put one on the cards. Sorting by date still returns ads in date

order.

• Some dates are approximate. Motors ads and many for-sale ads show an age, not a date, and those rows say so.
• A price band only narrows the search inside a category. On an all-category search Gumtree ignores it, so the

out-of-band rows are dropped here, uncharged, and you get fewer rows per page.

• sellerType only works where Gumtree has both, such as Cars, Vans and Property. An all-category search ignores

it.

• Any sort but relevance narrows what Gumtree serves. "Sofa" in London reported about 8,900 ads by relevance and

about 2,700 by date.

• 30 ads a page, fixed. A 1,000-listing pull is about 34 page loads, so for tens of thousands, split the search by

town, category or price band.

• Postcodes are patchy. Property ads carry coordinates, but a postcode only when the agent filled one in. Other

sections give the town and area and nothing more precise.

• Jobs have no price. Pay turns up in attributes when the advertiser wrote it.
• No seller phone or email, and nothing behind Gumtree's reveal-number button. To contact a seller, open the

listing and use Gumtree's own message button.

• Gumtree UK only. Not Gumtree Australia or South Africa.

🧭 Which classifieds scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Gumtree account or an API key? No. It reads the public pages a signed-out visitor sees.

How do I get the full ad text instead of the snippet? Turn on fetchDetails. The full text only exists on the listing page.

Why does postedAt carry postedAtIsApproximate: true? The ad showed an age like "1 day ago", so the timestamp was worked out from the moment of the run. Trust it to the unit Gumtree showed.

Is it legal to keep this data? These are public pages, and contact details are removed rather than collected. If you keep anything that identifies a person, that is your processing to justify under UK GDPR. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good start, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the input you used and the run ID, and the errorCode on any diagnostic row.