In this paper, we discuss scalable content‐oriented routing that enables storing, sharing, and searching data totally within the urban VANET. We introduce a scalable proactive content discovery scheme, hierarchical bloom‐filter routing (HBFR), to tackle mobility, large population, and rich content challenges of VANETs. Our simulation results show that HBFR achieves low latency and high content availability with relatively low overhead in practical VANET scenarios. In particular, HBFR improves the response time by up to 45% compared with the conventional Content Centric Networking (CCN) and reduces the traffic by up to 85% compared with timer‐based intelligent content search. HBFR suits the popular private data services the best and also achieves low response time comparable with that of flooding‐based content discovery when applying to popular public data services.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.