Every bike on this site was read off a German retailer's own product page during the last run (06:35 today). Nothing is hand-entered and nothing is invented. Where a retailer does not publish a fact, we say "unavailable" rather than filling it in.
We ingest the whole road-bike range each shop sells — €899 to €14.499 in the current dataset — and only then filter down to the budget bands shown on the homepage. The price range belongs to you, not to us.
Each bike earns points for its frame, drivetrain, wheels, brakes, a power meter if fitted, and a small adjustment for published weight. The groupset ladder carries the most weight because it is the most reliable signal of what a road bike is worth. Fields we could not establish score below the cheapest known option, so a missing spec never flatters a bike.
We fit a curve across the whole live dataset — what German shops are charging right now for each equipment level — and compare each bike's asking price to that curve. The current fit uses 450 bikes with R² = 0.797. A value score of 1.15 means the bike is priced about 15% below the middle of what German shops charge for that equipment level. A bike has to reach 1.06 before we will call it the winner of a band; below that we say there is no standout deal rather than crowning the least mediocre option.
That score is a ranking tool, not a valuation, and we do not put it in front of you as a euro figure. Equipment explains much less of price at the top of the market than at the bottom: in today's data, bikes scoring 67 equipment points run from a €1,699 CUBE to a €12,699 Pinarello, because what you are paying for there — frame prestige, aerodynamics, finishing kit — is not something we measure. So the recommendation quotes bikes we actually found instead: "164 of the 164 bikes with equal or better equipment in your size cost more; the next cheapest is €2,299." Where we have too few comparable bikes to say anything at all, we give no value score and the bike cannot win a band.
We deliberately do not rank on discount. A 40%-off sticker tells you about the retailer's reference price, not about the bike.
A bike can only win a band if a frame size compatible with the one you picked is confirmed in stock at that retailer, at a price we read off that retailer's own page. Where a shop prices per size, the price shown is the price of the size you can buy.
Centimetre sizes are compared directly (±1.5 cm counts as a fit and is labelled as equivalent). A letter size is only translated into centimetres where somebody who knows the bike said so: the shop printing the manufacturer's own dual label ("XL = 58 cm"), a mapping we read out of the manufacturer's own documentation and cite (Focus Izalco Max, Focus Paralane, Giant TCR/Propel/Defy/Contend), or a ladder harvested from many such dual labels (KTM, Scott).
For Canyon, Trek, ROSE, Lapierre, Liv, BH, Ridley, Merida, Wilier, Colnago, Megamo, Bulls we looked and did not find enough to stand behind, so their bikes appear when you pick a letter size rather than a centimetre one. The commonest reason is that the only centimetre figure a manufacturer publishes is a tube length, which is a different thing from a size name: Giant's own chart puts its L at a conventional 58–60 and gives it a 55.5 cm seat tube. Reading the tube as the size would send you a frame two sizes out, so where we cannot tell the difference we say nothing. A wrong size is worse than a missing option.
Listings are merged into one product only on brand, model, drivetrain and model year, or on a shared manufacturer barcode. Two trims, two drivetrains or two model years never merge. Where we are not certain, the listings stay separate and no "same bike cheaper here" claim is made.
Component text is parsed deterministically first. A language model is consulted only for fields that deterministic parsing could not resolve, and any value it returns is discarded unless it comes with evidence quoted verbatim from the retailer's own text. The model never chooses the winner, never decides that two bikes are the same, never converts a size, and never contributes a number to the ranking.
The review page shows every record, every warning, every size decision and the provenance of every fact.