ProxiesBeginner

Web Scraping

Web scraping is the automated extraction of data from websites, typically using scripts or tools that request pages and parse their content at scale.

Web Scraping explained

Web scraping uses software to fetch web pages and pull structured data out of them, turning content meant for humans into datasets you can analyze. It powers price monitoring, market research, lead generation, and SEO tracking.

At scale, scraping runs into anti-bot defenses: rate limits, CAPTCHAs, IP bans, and fingerprinting. Proxies are the standard countermeasure, spreading requests across many IPs so the target sees distributed, human-like traffic rather than one aggressive client.

Doing it responsibly

Scrape public data, respect rate limits and robots directives where required, and follow applicable laws and site terms.

Examples

  • 01Collecting competitor prices across thousands of product pages
  • 02Aggregating job listings from multiple boards into one dataset
  • 03Tracking search rankings for a set of keywords daily

Common use cases

Price monitoringMarket researchLead generationSEO and SERP trackingData aggregation

Frequently asked questions

Scraping publicly available data is legal in many jurisdictions, but it depends on the data, how you use it, local laws, and the site terms of service. When in doubt, consult a lawyer.

High-volume requests from one IP get rate-limited or banned. Proxies spread requests across many IPs so the target sees distributed traffic that is far less likely to be blocked.

Rate limits, IP bans, CAPTCHAs, browser fingerprinting, and behavioral analysis. Overcoming them takes IP rotation, realistic headers, pacing, and sometimes headless browsers.

Datacenter proxies for tolerant sites and speed, residential or mobile proxies for tough targets that block hosting IPs. Many projects mix types by target difficulty.

Crawling is discovering and following links to map a site, while scraping is extracting specific data from pages. Large projects usually crawl to find pages, then scrape them.

Rotate IPs with quality proxies, randomize and pace requests, send realistic headers and user agents, handle CAPTCHAs, and avoid hammering a site faster than a human would.

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Related terms

Residential ProxyRotating ProxyCAPTCHAIP RotationBrowser Fingerprint

Keep reading

Residential Proxy

A residential proxy routes your traffic through a real IP address assigned by an Internet Service Provider to a genuine home or mobile device, making requests look like ordinary consumer traffic.

Datacenter Proxy

A datacenter proxy routes traffic through IP addresses hosted in a data center rather than on a consumer connection, offering high speed and low cost at the price of easier detection.

Mobile Proxy

A mobile proxy routes traffic through IP addresses assigned by mobile carriers to 4G and 5G devices, giving it the highest trust level of any proxy type.

ISP Proxy

An ISP proxy is a datacenter-hosted IP that is registered under an Internet Service Provider, combining the speed of a data center with the trust of a residential address.

Rotating Proxy

A rotating proxy automatically assigns a different IP address to your requests, either on every request or at set intervals, spreading traffic across a large pool.

Sticky Session

A sticky session keeps the same proxy IP address for a set period, so multi-step actions like logging in and checking out complete from one consistent identity.