The engine behind MC Look Up
Answering “can I trust this truck?” used to mean tabbing through half a dozen government portals and hoping the history hadn’t been overwritten. We built the plumbing so you don’t have to.
A carrier’s full federal record — past and present — should be one search away for anyone who tenders freight.
The problem with federal carrier data
It’s scattered
Registration in one system, insurance filings in another, crashes and inspections in a third, revocation dockets in a fourth. No single federal page assembles the whole picture of one carrier.
It forgets
Official lookups show today’s state, and each monthly census release replaces the last. A carrier that folded, moved, or re-registered can quietly shed its past — unless someone kept the old copies.
It doesn’t decide
Raw percentiles and filing codes don’t answer the only question that matters at the dock: book or pass. Turning records into a defensible call takes a model, not another spreadsheet.
The pipeline, end to end
Archive first, then analyze
The core design decision behind MC Look Up: never throw away a snapshot. History is where the risk hides, so the pipeline is built to preserve it before anything else.
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Snapshot archive
Each monthly FMCSA census release is ingested and kept — not overwritten. The archive is what lets us show you what a carrier looked like six releases ago, not just today.
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Diffing engine
Consecutive snapshots are compared record by record. New registrations, vanished authorities, changed addresses, and swapped officers all surface as diffs — the raw material for spotting a shut-down fleet reappearing under a fresh number.
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Bulk refresh, ~48-hour cadence
Seven federal datasets are pulled on a rolling schedule of roughly two days: carrier census, authority history, revocation actions, insurance filings, crash records, roadside inspections, and BOC-3 process-agent designations.
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Scoring pass
Each carrier runs through a layered model: classification, hard reject gates, weighted deductions across safety, crash, insurance, and authority categories, pattern modifiers, then decision floors as the last defense against a false green light.
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Publication
The output lands on the carrier page as a verdict, a risk-flag list, a deduction table, a dated record timeline, filing history, identity connections, and a written analyst summary — every number traceable to its source row.
The seven datasets
Nothing on this site is scraped, purchased from brokers, or crowd-sourced. Every figure originates in a published federal dataset:
Provenance and independence: MC Look Up is a privately built and privately funded research tool. It has no relationship of any kind with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration or the US Department of Transportation — we simply analyze the datasets those agencies publish for public use. Verdicts and scores are our interpretation of that public record, not a government safety rating; the agencies’ own systems remain the authoritative source, and corrections to underlying records must be made with FMCSA directly.
How we operate
Access is free; volume pays
Anyone can vet a carrier without a card on file, and that stays true. Paid tiers exist for desks that search hundreds of times a day — they buy capacity, never access.
Show the work
A score you can’t audit is an opinion. Every deduction on a carrier page names its category, its weight, and the federal record it came from — disagree with us and you can check the math.
Collect almost nothing
Login is a one-time email code, so there’s no password database to breach. We don’t sell usage data, and your search history is yours, not inventory.
Put the pipeline to work
Type an email, get a code, run a carrier. The whole thing takes less time than reading this page did.