Glossary · Scraping & automation
Web scraping
The automated collection of data from websites, the single most common reason people use proxies at scale.
Web scraping is extracting information from websites by program rather than by hand. Instead of a person copying prices or listings, a script fetches pages and parses out the data, at a speed and volume no manual process could match. Price monitoring, market research, SEO tracking and dataset building all sit on top of it.
Proxies enter because scale gives you away. A single address requesting thousands of pages is an obvious pattern, and sites throttle or block it precisely because no real person browses that way. Spreading the work across many addresses is what makes large-scale collection look like ordinary traffic.
The friction scrapers hit, rate limits, CAPTCHAs, geo-blocks, is mostly a response to automation, and the choice of proxy type follows from which of those a target leans on. A site that screens by network wants residential; a site that only rate-limits may not care.
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