What is Web Scraping?
The automated collection of publicly available data from websites, commonly used for price monitoring, SEO, research and AI training datasets.
A scraper requests pages the way a browser would, extracts the fields it needs from the returned HTML or JSON, and stores them in a structured form. At small scale this needs nothing special; at scale it needs proxies, because thousands of requests from one address will be rate limited or blocked long before the job finishes.
Which proxy type fits depends entirely on the target's defences. Open APIs and lightly protected sites are fine over datacenter IPs. Retail, travel, social and search targets inspect the network origin and generally require residential or ISP addresses.
Scraping publicly accessible data is broadly lawful in the EU and US, but that is not the whole picture: terms of service, personal data under the GDPR, and copyright in the content itself all apply independently. Collect public, non-personal data, pace your requests, and take legal advice for anything commercially significant.
Related terms
CAPTCHA
A challenge designed to tell humans from bots. Clean residential IPs and good request hygiene reduce how often CAPTCHAs are triggered.
WAF (Web Application Firewall)
A security layer that filters and blocks suspicious web traffic. Residential proxies and realistic request patterns help pass WAF checks.
Rotating Proxy
A proxy that assigns a new IP address on every request or at set intervals, distributing traffic across many IPs to avoid rate limits and bans.
Proxy Pool
The total set of IP addresses a provider can assign. A larger, more diverse pool means lower detection rates and better success at scale.