What Is Web Scraping Used For?

What the e-commerce job costs in proxy traffic: if each product page weighs about 2 MB (an assumption; pages vary a lot), 1,000 pages is about 2 GB a day, or $5.90 at ProxyField's $2.95/GB.

Retail is one of the most common users of web scraping. A store tracks competitors' prices and stock every day, sometimes every hour, and adjusts its own; a brand checks which sellers advertise below the minimum advertised price; a category manager compares assortments to see which products the market carries. Reviews show which complaints repeat. Our price scraper and e-commerce scraper pages cover the setups, and the Amazon scraper API, for Amazon product and search pages, is priced at $0.60 per 1,000 successful results, or $0.30 from 10,000 results in one purchase (in development: Contact sales).

Prices differ by location, so retail scrapers request pages from the country and city they price for. ProxyField targets country, region (state) and city, including all 50 US states.

SEO teams scrape search results to track their positions, their competitors' and the search features, such as the AI Overview and People Also Ask, by keyword, country and city; see proxies for SEO. The Google SERP API, for the results page as JSON with those blocks parsed, is priced at $1.20 per 1,000 successful results, or $0.80 from 10,000 results in one purchase (in development: Contact sales). Marketers also scrape competitors' landing pages and pricing pages for changes, public social posts for brand mentions (social media scraper), and public business directories for B2B lead lists (lead scraper).

Investors use web data as "alternative data": signals that appear before official figures. Job postings show which companies are hiring and where; product prices and discounts show demand and margins; app reviews, web traffic estimates and store counts show growth. News and forum sentiment feed trading models. Data vendors sell such signals ready-made: Bloomberg's alternative data catalog lists consumer transactions, web traffic, foot traffic and mobile app activity, which track how users engage with a company over time. They give an early, directional view, not a forecast, so analysts set them next to filings.

Filings themselves come without scraping: the SEC's EDGAR serves company submissions and extracted XBRL data as JSON through APIs on data.sec.gov, and its fair-access policy limits each user to no more than 10 requests per second (SEC developer resources). Use an official API where one exists, and scrape only what it does not cover. Funds that buy or collect alternative data run compliance checks on its sources, because using data that should not have been collected creates legal risk. More on financial data: financial data scraper.

Listing sites publish prices, rents, photos and days on market for every property. Investors and agents scrape them to value properties, find under-priced listings, follow rents by neighborhood and spot shifts in supply. See the real estate scraper.

Fares and hotel rates change many times a day and differ by the visitor's country, device and dates. Hotels check that their rates match across booking sites; travel companies and fare-alert services track prices to tell travelers when to book; airlines and hotels watch competitors' prices for their own pricing. See the travel scraper.

Job boards and company career pages show who is hiring for which skills, where and, in some ads, at what pay. Recruiters scrape them to source roles, HR teams to benchmark titles and pay ranges, and analysts to track the labor market. See the job scraper.

AI teams scrape public text, documents and Q&A pages to train models and to fetch current pages that ground an AI answer. In the EU, a site can reserve its content from commercial text and data mining by machine-readable means under Article 4(3) of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (EU) 2019/790, and AI scrapers that rely on that exception have to respect the reservation; see web scraping for AI training. Monitoring what AI search engines say about a brand is a use case of its own: see AI search scraper APIs.

Researchers collect public posts, prices and records for studies; journalists scrape public databases and court or government sites for investigations; public bodies monitor prices and job ads for statistics. EU statistical offices use web-scraped online prices in consumer price statistics, and Eurostat published guidelines on web scraping for the HICP, the EU's harmonised index of consumer prices, in November 2020. These projects usually run small, slow crawls with careful documentation of what was collected and why.

Brands scan marketplaces for counterfeit products, unauthorized sellers and misuse of their trademarks. Advertisers and agencies load publisher pages from the countries and cities where a campaign runs, to check that their ads appear where they paid for them, next to suitable content.

Anything a public page shows: text, prices, product attributes, ratings and reviews, links, images and their alt text, dates, tables, search results and listings, plus the structured data many pages embed for search engines. What you may collect is a separate question: personal data, copyrighted content, data behind a login and a site's terms each have their own rules. See is web scraping legal.

They need fresh data, from many pages, often by location, on a schedule. That means many requests to the same sites, so they run through rotating IPs at a polite pace. ProxyField residential proxies give a new IP on every request or a sticky session from 30 s to 36 h, target country, region and city, and run unlimited concurrent threads, with a 99.6% success rate, according to our service data. You pay per GB with no subscription; traffic never expires, and all purchases are final. Setups and costs by job: proxies for web scraping.