What Do We Mean When We Talk about Web Scraping?

Web scraping, technically speaking, is the process of automated data extraction from the web. It is the equivalent of someone manually copying a product description, flight details, and price, or anything else you can find online. Only, it is done using scripts and automated tools. What automation enables is scale - you can extract and productively use much more information in a much shorter time with automation.

This technical description, while a start, does not fully explain what we talk about when we talk about the web scraping solutions industry. As defined above, web scraping can be done by anyone, at any scale, and for any purpose, good or bad. Due to bad use cases, web scraping is often portrayed in the media and reaches consumers as a somewhat dirty term. 

But that is not what web scraping is for millions of people, developers, scientists, journalists, and professionals in world-leading companies. When we talk about the public web data collection solutions these people use, we are referring to something much more specific. Thus, let’s look at what web scraping is as something that underlies the usefulness of the web itself.

What web scraping is NOT?

Let’s start with denouncing some still unfortunately persistent myths about web scraping.

Web scraping is NOT about collecting private, paywalled, confidential, or internal data.

Web scraping is NOT about breaching any security systems to take something exclusive and privileged.

Web scraping is NOT about collecting user or consumer data for profiling purposes.

Web scraping is NOT a shady or niche practice.

While some bad actors use web scraping in this way, and you might even notice some companies advertising such shady practices, the abuses of the technology do not define it. 

What is web scraping?

Web scraping or public web data collection is about collecting public web data that is out in the open online:

• Web scraping is about collecting data that can be viewed and copied by any internet user without logging in to any accounts, agreeing to any terms of service, or paying anything.

• It is about data that everyone can legally access and note manually, such as product prices on an e-shop.

• Instead of doing it manually, web scraping involves automated technology to do it more efficiently.

Web scraping IS a huge and growing industry that follows various national and international rules and regulations:

• Major companies in the market are huge enterprises across the globe, subject to various laws, KYC requirements, audits, etc.

• It is an industry that, in addition to existing laws, is actively developing its own voluntary self-regulation mechanisms.

• It is considered part of the $209 billion big data infrastructure industry, led by brands like Google and AWS.

Web scraping IS done by businesses from small to big, from solopreneurs to the world’s most valuable brands, for a variety of purposes:

• Monitoring of competitors and what they publicly show, such as prices, product descriptions, etc.

• Self-auditing, such as checking how your content appears across channels to outside visitors and verifying that your ads are displayed as they should.

• Search engine optimization.

• Cybersecurity - monitoring the web for threats.

• AI training and the functioning of AI tools.

Web scraping IS the technology that enables everyday useful services:

• Internet search engines. Google is actually the world’s largest web scraper. And it will likely only grow as such, as with the introduction of “information agents,” Google will probably need to scrape the web on an even larger scale.

• Best-deal aggregators in e-commerce, travel, hospitality, and pretty much any other case, where you can order products or services online.

• Internet archiving that lets users see what websites looked like before.

• AI chatbots and the emerging agentic AI tools for the web. 

Web scraping IS an irreplaceable part of many publicly beneficial activities:

• Scientific research.

• Online auditing, such as ad verification.

• Investigative journalism.

• Tracking the spread of disease and other public service monitoring.

• Fighting various forms of cybercrime and removing illegal content.

Summing up

Web scraping is the automated extraction of web data using specialized tools. It is also part of a booming public web data solutions industry, crucial to many other industries from e-commerce to AI, and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, web scraping underlies everything we do online, from the classical keyword-based search to the future, when AI agents could book flights, autonomously find information, and save us time in many more ways.