What is Web Scraping? A Comprehensive Guide for 2025

Web scraping has become a hot topic in the tech world, but what exactly is it? How does it work, and is it legal? This guide will walk you through the essentials of web scraping—what it entails, its legality, typical use cases, how web scrapers operate, the challenges involved, and how ProxyTee can help you overcome these obstacles for a more seamless experience.

Let’s dive into web scraping and discover how ProxyTee's Unlimited Residential Proxies can elevate your data collection strategies.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting data from websites and formatting it into structured forms like CSV or JSON for easy access and analysis.

While you can manually copy information from web pages, this approach is inefficient for large-scale data extraction. Web scraping tools and custom scripts automate the process, enabling faster and more accurate data collection. These tools vary depending on the project’s complexity and scale.

Types of Web Scrapers

• Custom Scripts: Tailored programs written to extract specific data from particular websites. These scripts are highly flexible but require coding skills.
• Browser Extensions: Add-ons for web browsers that allow users to capture data while they browse. They are simple to use but less powerful for large-scale tasks.
• Desktop Applications: Standalone programs that offer an easy-to-use interface for scraping, often with advanced features like scheduling and data export options.
• Cloud-Based Services: Web scraping platforms hosted in the cloud. These services let you set up and manage scraping tasks remotely, ideal for scaling up operations without the need for local resources.

Is Web Scraping Legal?

One common misconception is that web scraping is inherently illegal. This is false—web scraping is legal when conducted ethically and in compliance with laws and website policies.

Legal Guidelines for Ethical Web Scraping

• Public Data Only: Scrape only publicly available information, not data behind logins or paywalls.
• Compliance with GDPR and CCPA: Avoid collecting personally identifiable information (PII) unless you have explicit consent.
• Respect Terms of Service: Check the website’s terms and conditions before scraping.
• Follow Robots.txt: Many websites use the robots.txt file to specify which pages can and cannot be scraped. Always respect these guidelines.

Remember: Web scraping is a tool; how you use it determines its legality and ethics.

Common Use Cases for Web Scraping

Web scraping is widely used across industries to gather critical data for decision-making and business strategies. Here are some of the most popular applications:

• Price Comparison: E-commerce businesses and consumers alike rely on web scraping to track prices across multiple websites and secure the best deals. Businesses can also monitor competitors’ pricing strategies and adjust their own accordingly.
• Market Monitoring: Web scraping helps companies track market trends and product availability in real time. This data is essential for timely decision-making and adapting to changes in the market.
• Competitor Analysis: By extracting details from competitors’ websites—such as product descriptions, pricing tactics, and customer reviews—businesses gain valuable insights that inform their competitive strategies.
• Lead Generation: Web scraping can automate the collection of contact information from various sources, helping businesses build extensive databases for potential leads. This saves significant time compared to manual data collection.
• Sentiment Analysis: Collect and analyze public opinions from social media and review sites to gauge customer sentiment toward products or services. This information helps businesses address customer concerns and improve their offerings.

How a Web Scraper Works

A web scraper extracts data through several steps, depending on the type of site and scraper method used.

Steps in Web Scraping

1. Connect to the Target Site: The scraper sends an HTTP request to the target website to retrieve its content.
2. Parse or Render the Page: Depending on the site type (static or dynamic), the scraper either parses the HTML or uses a headless browser to fully render the page.
3. Apply Scraping Logic: The scraper selects and extracts specific content using HTML selectors.
4. Repeat the Process (Web Crawling): The scraper follows additional links to gather data from multiple pages.
5. Export the Data: The collected data is reformatted into structured formats like CSV or JSON for easy analysis.

Once configured, a web scraper can run locally, on a server, or in the cloud.

Main Challenges in Scraping the Web

There are some challenges. One key problem is that scrapers rely on a website’s HTML, meaning if any user interface change on a website happen it will affect web scraping results, you will need to update your code logic for your scrapers accordingly. In these situations it is best practice to use robust HTML selectors that will work even with minor changes. 

Other more technical problems are more serious. Most sites use techniques to defend against bots, thus blocking your scrapers from collecting data by using the following techniques:

• IP Bans: The web server blocks an IP address that it determines is from automated access.
• Geo-restrictions: Web content can vary by geographic locations due to geo-restrictions. These restrictions make it very difficult to scrap the website properly as a result.
• Rate limiting: When a web scraper performs excessive request in a very short time period, it might result in bans, or blocking your IP from accessing further.
• CAPTCHAs: Websites can display CAPTCHAs if a user behavior seem not like human or having low IP reputation, so it can determine that the user is a real human user. Solving a captcha using software or web scraping tools is difficult and blocks the scraping process.

Overcoming such anti-bot techniques requires advanced and sometime inconsistent, and can only last temporarily. Luckily, ProxyTee's products provide great features to fix such issue by providing a solution which involves proxies!

ProxyTee Unlimited Residential Proxies: A Perfect Solution

ProxyTee offers Unlimited Residential Proxies, the ideal solution for those requiring robust and reliable access to websites without being blocked. Here's how ProxyTee stands out:

• Unlimited Bandwidth: Forget bandwidth constraints. With ProxyTee, data-heavy scraping operations are streamlined without any additional costs.
• Extensive Global Network: ProxyTee offers over 20 million IP addresses across more than 100 countries.
• Multiple Protocol Support: ProxyTee supports both HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols, which allows easy setup with various web scraping tools.
• User-Friendly Interface: The clean and intuitive GUI ensures that starting your proxy usage is quick and simple, eliminating the need for advanced technical experience.
• Auto-Rotation: Our automatic rotation system changes IP addresses at set intervals to prevent detections and bans during scraping processes.
• API Integration: With ProxyTee's API, it allows seamless integration with many apps and processes, perfect for web scraping automation.

Plus, our residential proxies offer:

• Rotating Residential Proxies: The IP addresses are dynamically changed.
• Geo-Targeting: Access precise location-based data without the randomness of continent-level options as many other providers do.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to competitors, ProxyTee offers pricing up to 50% cheaper without sacrificing performance. Check the prices!

Conclusion

Web scraping automates the process of collecting data from websites and it's extremely beneficial for many industries. However, challenges such as anti-bot techniques, geo-restrictions, and rate limiting exist. Using a proxy server is necessary for overcoming such challenges.

Instead of searching for the best provider, go with the ProxyTee, your best partner. With a wide network and very reliable services, ProxyTee offers great options for various needs, focusing on affordable and flexible unlimited residential proxies and all other proxy needs through Datacenter Proxies, Static Residential Proxies, and Mobile Proxies. Find the best fit for your project at our pricing page.