Web Scraping
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the automated collection of publicly available data from websites at scale. A scraper requests web pages the same way a browser does, then extracts specific fields — prices, product titles, reviews, availability — and stores them in a structured format such as JSON or CSV for analysis.
Modern web scraping combines several techniques: HTTP clients for simple pages, headless browsers for JavaScript-rendered content, proxy networks to distribute requests, and parsers that survive site redesigns. The output powers use cases from competitor price monitoring and digital shelf analytics to market research and training data for AI models.
Web scraping of public data is generally lawful when done responsibly — respecting site stability, avoiding personal data, and complying with applicable regulations — and it underpins much of the commercial data economy, including price comparison and travel-fare aggregation.
Further Reading
- Data Crawling vs Data Scraping: What's the Difference?Crawling discovers and indexes pages; scraping extracts specific data from them. Learn the difference, when to use each, and how they work together.
- Price Scraping: How It Works, Legality and Build vs BuyHow price scraping works stage by stage, what the law actually distinguishes, why it is hard at scale, and when to build a scraper versus buy a price feed.
Related Terms
- Data CrawlingThe automated discovery of URLs across a site or the wider web, ahead of extracting data from them.
- Web CrawlerA bot that systematically browses websites by following links to discover pages.
- Headless BrowserA web browser without a graphical user interface used for automated web scraping.
- Scraper APIA managed API that returns structured data from target websites without you running scraping infrastructure.