Web scraping is the automated process of extracting data from websites using software. A scraper sends HTTP requests to target URLs, receives HTML responses, parses the DOM to locate specific elements, and saves the extracted data as structured records — CSV, JSON, or database rows.
Modern web scraping must overcome a stack of defences: JavaScript-rendered content that requires a real browser engine, anti-bot protection layers that inspect TLS fingerprints and browser signals, rate limits that cap requests per IP, and CAPTCHA challenges that gate access to authenticated sections. The toolchain ranges from simple HTTP fetch + HTML parser combinations to full browser automation frameworks like Playwright and Puppeteer.
AlterLab's scraping API abstracts the entire complexity stack — proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, JavaScript rendering, and challenge resolution — into a single POST request. Developers send a URL and receive clean HTML or extracted JSON without managing any infrastructure.