The AI-Powered web scraping tools landscape

AI scraping tools are popping out each day, let's map them

"In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you." – Victor Kiam

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There’s no day passing by without a new AI scraping tool being announced. I've never seen such a moment during my whole career in the web scraping industry. There’s a great interest in automating tasks like gathering data and, for the first time, some startups in the field are being accepted at YCombinator.

In this race, the participants are open-source projects, no-code tools, and, of course, established companies in the industries that use AI in their products' backend.

To give a broader view of the landscape, which for sure is not exhaustive, I’ve decided to categorize all these tools using two drivers:

• The usage of publicly available AI models (typically LLMs like GPT) or, instead, the usage of internally developed AI models

• Where the magic happens: do I need to run the models on my computer or the elaboration happens on the cloud?

Disclaimer

I tried my best to include every tool that explicitly claims to use AI on its website but for sure I’ve missed someone. If you’re developing an AI tool for scraping not included in the map, please write it down in the comment section and I’ll add it.

Also, some commercial tools claim to use AI inside their engine but there’s no way for me to be sure if it’s true or not, so I’m relying on what I see on their websites.

The result of my research is the following map.

Private AI Models, running on the cloud

In this category, we find all the tools that create the scrapers and map the output to a certain data structure, that developed internal AI solutions and are usable with an API or via web. I don’t need to download a client on my machine or host a LLM model and run it.

We can find in this quadrant:

• Nimble’s different API tools for scraping, from vertical ones to SERP to E-commerce to the generic Web API

• Zyte API, which uses the experience of Zyte in web scraping and AI to programmatically write scrapers for your needs.

• Browse.AI, where you have a point-and-click interface for selecting the desired output data, and Browse.AI returns the full scrape of the website in an Excel spreadsheet

• Paragon, backed by YC, they’re basically using scraping techniques and AI to monitor the web and provide data feeds

• Reworkd, another company backed by YC, they’re creating an end-to-end data extraction pipeline using LLMs.

• Kadoa, is a web interface that enables you to create the workflow for scraping websites in a no-code environment

• Saldor, again a company backed by YC in the Summer 24 batch, created a scraper that, given a prompt and a target website, extracts the desired data.

• Blat.ai, a tool that aims to deliver production-ready web scraping code in minutes

• WebTab, a ChatGPT-like interface to use for scraping using prompts in natural language

• String AI, a tool for scraping even websites protected by anti-bots

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Private AI Models, using a client

Here we find tools that require a client to install on your machine and use certain AI models to understand the HTML code of the website

We can find in this quadrant:

• Octoparse, which recently added some AI in its tool for scraping

• AnyPicker, in this case, you need to install a Chrome extension and the execution of the HTML mapping will happen in the cloud

• ScrapeStorm, similar to Octoparse, you download a client and get the data you need after giving some instructions to the tool

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Public AI Models, running on the cloud

In this category, we have all the tools that use LLMs for scraping without the user downloading any client.

• Bardeen.Ai, more than a scraping tool is an automation framework with multiple connectors to different software. One of the use cases is that you get data from the web and elaborate it with LLMs, creating a data pipeline running on the cloud

• Make.com, formerly Integromat, works just like Bardeen but with thousands of different connectors

• N8N is a free and open-source alternative to Make.com and Bardeen. It can be both self-hosted and on the cloud.

Public AI Models, self-hosted solutions

In the last quadrant, we have solutions that use public LLMs and need to be installed in your device.

• ScrapeGraph-AI, if you follow this newsletter, you’ve already read some articles using it for both scraping and writing scrapers using GPTs and local models. Here’s the latest one

  THE LAB #60: Writing scrapers with LLMs

• CyberScraper 2077, I love this name and it seems an interesting solution for scraping and using LLMs for parsing data. I think you’ll see an article about it soon in this newsletter.

• ScrapeGhost, again an OSS using GPT for parsing data

Do you have any tools you suggest? Did you try some of the tools mentioned in the map? Feel free to write your impressions in the comment section and let me know what’s your thoughts!

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