Web Scraping
Web scraping is the automated extraction of data from websites — fetching pages programmatically and parsing their content into structured data.
Definition
Web scraping is the practice of automatically collecting data from websites using software instead of copying it by hand. A scraper requests pages, then parses the HTML (or rendered DOM) to extract structured information such as prices, listings, reviews or contact details.
How scraping works
A typical pipeline fetches a URL, renders JavaScript if needed, parses the response, extracts the target fields, and stores them. At scale, scrapers rely on proxies and IP rotation to avoid rate limits and on techniques to solve or avoid CAPTCHAs and anti-bot defenses.
Doing it responsibly
Respect robots.txt, rate-limit your requests, and comply with each site's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws.
Examples
Using Python with requests and BeautifulSoup to extract product prices
Driving a headless browser with Playwright to scrape a JavaScript-heavy site
Common Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
Keep Learning
All termsRate Limiting
Rate limiting restricts how many requests a client can make in a given time, and it is one of the most common defenses scrapers must work around.
Read definitionIP Rotation
IP rotation is the practice of automatically cycling through multiple IP addresses so that successive requests originate from different IPs.
Read definitionUser Agent
A user agent is the identifying string a browser sends with every request, telling the server which browser, version and operating system you are using.
Read definitionCAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a challenge–response test used to tell humans and bots apart, such as identifying images or checking a box, to block automated access.
Read definitionHeadless Browser
A headless browser is a real browser that runs without a visible interface, controlled by code — the workhorse for scraping JavaScript-heavy sites and automation.
Read definition