Facebook Marketplace Search URL Builder

Retyping the same filters every time you open Marketplace is the part of car hunting nobody talks about. Set the filters once below and this page writes the search address for you: open it, copy it, bookmark it, or send it to whoever is car-shopping with you. Everything runs in your browser on the values you type. Nothing is sent to us and nothing is fetched from Facebook.

What each filter actually does, and which ones are unreliable

Price, year and mileage behave the way you would expect: they are numeric bounds and Marketplace applies them. Radius does not — it is a hint the results are ranked against, not a boundary they respect. Sort order is the most useful setting on the page and the one most people never change, because Marketplace's default ordering is not chronological.

• Keywords. This is where the make and model go. There is no separate make or model parameter that survives Facebook's periodic reshuffles of its category structure, so the words do the work instead. "Match those words exactly" narrows a broad term at the cost of missing listings where the seller spelled it differently, which on a platform of hand-typed listings is often.
• Price and year. Straightforward bounds. Leaving one side blank leaves that side open, so a maximum price with no minimum is a valid and usually sensible search.
• Mileage. Applied against whatever the seller entered in the odometer field. Sellers who left it blank drop out of a mileage-bounded search entirely, so a tight maximum silently hides a slice of the listings rather than just the high-mileage ones. Worth knowing before you set it at 60,000 and conclude there is nothing out there.
• Radius. The least trustworthy control here, and not because of the URL. Marketplace measures distance from the seller's profile location rather than from the car, so a 40-mile radius returns cars whose owners live within roughly 40 miles and misses cars parked down the road from you whose owner never updated their profile. We went through this in detail in searching Marketplace by location.
• Sort by. Set it to newest first and leave it there. Marketplace's own default ranks on engagement and relevance, which means a well-priced car posted twenty minutes ago can sit below something that has been up for two weeks collecting comments.
• Listed within. Useful as a second pass rather than a first one. Combined with newest-first it turns the search into a short list of what has appeared since you last looked.

Two things the builder deliberately does not put in the URL. There is no make or model parameter, for the reason above. And there is no location code in the path, even though Marketplace sometimes puts one there, because those codes change and a bookmark carrying a stale one is worse than no bookmark at all. The search centers on the location already set on your Marketplace account, so changing it there changes what this URL returns without you having to rebuild it.

Why a saved search still misses deals

A URL is a shortcut to running a search, not a subscription to it. Newest-first puts the freshest listing at the top the moment you open the page, but something that was posted and sold between two of your visits was never on a screen you were looking at. On the cars worth having, that window is measured in hours.

This is the honest limitation of everything on this page, and it is also the reason this site exists. Saving the search inside Marketplace does not close the gap either: Marketplace's own notifications for a saved search compete with group posts and friend requests in the same queue and routinely arrive hours late, when they arrive at all. We compared the two directly in saved searches versus CarSnipe.

The gap is only closed by something re-running the search for you on a fixed interval and telling you what changed. That is what CarSnipe does with the search you just built: Basic re-runs it every 15 minutes for $9.99 a month, Pro every 3 minutes for $24.99, and every match arrives in Telegram with the photos, the price and the link.

Methodology: where these parameters come from

The builder emits https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/category/vehicles with the filters written into the query string. That base path was confirmed live on Sep 8, 2026 and returns Marketplace's vehicles category.

sortBy=creation_time_descend is the one parameter here we can vouch for from our own work rather than from documentation: it is the ordering CarSnipe's browser extension uses on every check it runs, which is a lot of checks. The rest — query, exact, minPrice, maxPrice, minYear, maxYear, minMileage, maxMileage, radius, daysSinceListed — are the names Marketplace has used consistently and that multiple independent tools rely on. Facebook publishes no specification for any of them and can change them without notice.

So the tool is built to fail quietly rather than loudly. Every filter you leave blank is left out of the address entirely, an unrecognised parameter is ignored by Marketplace rather than rejected, and the base path is a real page on its own — which means the worst case is a search that comes back broader than you asked for, not a link that goes nowhere. If a filter here stops taking effect, that is what has happened, and the date above is how you tell whether this page has been looked at since.

Photo by Shane Ryan on Unsplash