What is a Web Scraping Bot and How Does It Work?

A web scraping bot is a computer program that automatically visits websites and collects predefined information. It’s basically a robot that scans web pages and pulls out what you need.

For example, big online stores use scraping bots to check the prices on their competitors’ websites. Travel sites use them to track airline ticket prices. Even sports apps use bots to extract data like scores or player stats. What we’re trying to say is that many industries use web scraping solutions.

If you think you could benefit from a web scraping bot and want to build one, you could use tools like Scrapy, Puppeteer, and BeautifulSoup. These tools help developers create bots that can crawl sites, extract data, and save it.

What Can Web Scraping Bots Be Used For?

A scraping bot has tons of use cases. One, and probably the most common, use case is price tracking. As mentioned in the introduction, companies use it to check how much other stores are charging so they can stay competitive.

Another big use case is job posting aggregation. Sites like Indeed or ZipRecruiter gather job listings from different company pages using scraping bots.

Businesses also do SEO and marketing research. They use a web scraping API to extract data about keywords, backlinks, search rankings, and more.

Overall, the competitor data gathering niche is huge. With the right web scraping API, companies get product details, prices, and customer reviews from rival sites. It’s a never-ending cycle of everyone collecting each other’s data to find spots to improve or remain competitive.

Are Web Scraping Bots Legal?

Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s no. Web scraping has long been in a grey area. It mostly depends on the country and the website’s rules, and how explicitly they manage to state their position about data collection.

In the U.S., the famous LinkedIn v. HiQ Labs case ruled that public data could be scraped. But the law still isn’t clear in many places. If you haven’t got the financial resources to fight lawsuits from giants like LinkedIn or other big businesses, you may lose before the verdict is even finalized.

There’s also a big difference between ethical and shady scraping. Ethical bots extract data from public pages and follow the rules. Malicious bots ignore the rules, overload servers, and collect personal or private data, which is almost always off-limits.

Generally speaking, it’s always a good idea to read the site’s Terms and Conditions before using a web scraping tool or a web scraping API. Also, if you can, you may want to consult with a legal counsel about certain nuances regarding web scraping.

What Are the Risks of Web Scraping?

Web scraping can come with serious risks. If you break the rules, you might face legal fines and lawsuits. Sites can also block your IP if they catch your scraping bot and you will be blacklisted. However, this last part is easily fixed using rotating proxies .

Most websites have rules in their Terms of Service, and if your web scraping API ignores those, it may be only a matter of time before you get into trouble.

Also, web scraping can crash a website if too many requests hit at once. It can slow them down significantly or even make them go offline. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to space out how often your bot visits the website.

Web scraping has been controversial since the start, and will most likely continue to be. The reason is that many people use it with no regard to ethics.

It’s okay when people use it for research or ethical data collection. Others, on the other hand, use it to steal content or overload systems. Until malicious scraping is controlled, it will remain a controversial topic.

How Do Scraping Bots Work?

A scraping bot follows a few basic steps:

• Fetching HTML: it visits a webpage and loads the code behind it.
• Parsing data: it looks through the code and finds the info that you want.
• Extract data: it pulls the info out.
• Storing data: it saves the info in a file or a database.
• Repeat: the bot moves on to the next page and starts over.

If you’re not that tech-savvy and want a more practical example, here are the equivalent steps in a real-life scenario:

• The bot visits a website.
• It looks for product names and prices.
• It extracts the data.
• It saves it in a CSV file or some other format.
• It moves on to the next product page.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can read about automated web scraping in several different languages.

How to Build a Simple Web Scraping Bot

To build a basic scraping bot, you can use Python with libraries like BeautifulSoup or Selenium. Node.js with Puppeteer works, too. You can also use a web scraping API to make it even easier.

Here’s a quick code of what it could look like for a one-page scraping task:

import re
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://iproyal.com/residential-proxies/"
resp = requests.get(url)
resp.raise_for_status()

soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")

# find all links that wrap a "Buy Now" card
cards = [
    a for a in soup.find_all("a", href=True)
    if "Buy Now" in a.get_text(" ", strip=True)
]

# regexes to extract plan name, per‑GB, and total
plan_re   = re.compile(r"(\d+GB)")
per_gb_re = re.compile(r"\$(\d+(?:\.\d+))\s*/GB")
tot_re    = re.compile(r"Total\s*\$(\d+(?:\.\d+))")

for card in cards:
    txt = card.get_text(" ", strip=True)

    m_plan = plan_re.search(txt)
    m_pgb  = per_gb_re.search(txt)
    m_tot  = tot_re.search(txt)

    if not (m_plan and m_pgb and m_tot):
        continue

    print(f"Plan:         {m_plan.group(1)}")
    print(f"Price per GB: ${m_pgb.group(1)}")
    print(f"Total price:  ${m_tot.group(1)}")
    print("-" * 30)

This code shows the flow of:

• Going to the website.
• Getting the HTML.
• Finding the prices that you want.
• Extracting data.

The best part is that you don’t even need to code everything. Tools like Octoparse or ParseHub are no-code or low-code tools that can help you build a scraping bot without writing too much code.

That said, it’s not always simple. Some sites will block scraping bots, some will change their layout often. To overcome these hurdles, you’ll have to debug and update your tool continuously.

Conclusion

A web scraping bot or a web scraping API can be a powerful tool for gathering information. It can help you track prices, watch your competition, or gather job listings, among other things. But be careful. Using a scraping bot incorrectly can cause legal, ethical, and financial problems.