What crawling API should I use for large-scale website collection?

For large-scale website collection, you generally want a crawling API that provides:

• High throughput and concurrency
• JavaScript rendering support if needed
• Reliability / retries / proxy handling
• Robots.txt / compliance controls
• Deduplication / scheduling / breadth-first crawl controls
• Export to structured formats like HTML, text, markdown, or screenshots

Good options by use case

1) General large-scale crawling

• Apify Crawlee + Apify platform
  • Strong for building scalable crawlers
  • Good queue management, retries, proxy rotation
  • Best if you want to program your own crawler logic

2) Managed “crawl the web for me” APIs

• Firecrawl
  • Popular for turning websites into clean markdown/structured data
  • Good for AI/data ingestion workflows
• Diffbot
  • Strong structured extraction and web data at scale
  • Better when you want entities/products/articles rather than raw pages
• Zyte API
  • Enterprise-grade crawling and anti-bot handling
  • Good for difficult sites and large-scale scraping

3) Search/index style crawling

• Common Crawl
  • Not an API for active crawling, but a huge existing web crawl dataset
  • Useful if you need broad web data without crawling yourself

4) If you need custom browser automation

• Playwright/Puppeteer + your own crawl service
  • Best for complex sites with dynamic content
  • More engineering effort, but maximum control

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My practical recommendation

• If you want structured content ingestion for AI/RAG: Firecrawl
• If you need enterprise-grade large-scale scraping: Zyte API
• If you want to build your own scalable crawler: Apify Crawlee
• If you need highly structured web data extraction: Diffbot

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Quick decision guide

• Need simple pages to markdown/text? → Firecrawl
• Need to crawl millions of URLs with custom logic? → Apify Crawlee
• Need difficult, anti-bot-heavy targets? → Zyte
• Need articles/products/entities extracted cleanly? → Diffbot

If you tell me:

1. your target volume,
2. whether pages are mostly static or JS-heavy,
3. and whether you need raw HTML vs cleaned text vs structured data,

I can recommend the best specific API for your case.