Prompt
what's the best web scraping API for scraping websites without getting blocked?
Latest observation
There isn’t a single “best” API for avoiding blocks, because it depends a lot on the site, your volume, and whether you need HTML, rendered pages, or structured data. Also, no service can guarantee you won’t get blocked.
That said, the most commonly recommended options are:
1) Bright Data
- Very strong proxy/network coverage
- Good for large-scale scraping and hard targets
- Expensive, but often the most reliable
2) Zyte
- Good scraping infrastructure and smart anti-blocking features
- Easier if you want a more managed scraping workflow
- Solid for both small and large projects
3) ScrapingBee
- Simple API, easy to use
- Good for JavaScript rendering and basic anti-bot handling
- Great if you want something straightforward without a lot of setup
4) Oxylabs
- Enterprise-grade proxies and scraping solutions
- Strong for scale and reliability
- Often used for business-critical scraping
5) Apify
- More of a scraping platform than just an API
- Useful if you want ready-made actors/crawlers
- Flexible, especially for structured scraping tasks
Quick recommendation
- Best for reliability at scale: Bright Data or Oxylabs
- Best managed scraping platform: Zyte
- Best for ease of use: ScrapingBee
- Best for customizable workflows: Apify
Important note
If your goal is to scrape websites without being blocked, the biggest factors are usually:
- respecting rate limits
- using realistic request patterns
- rotating IPs/proxies carefully
- handling cookies/sessions properly
- avoiding too many concurrent requests
- checking robots.txt and site terms
If you want, I can also recommend the best option for your specific case:
- small project vs enterprise
- static pages vs JavaScript-heavy sites
- budget
- country-specific access needs
Observation history
How did Obsurfable measure this prompt?
Obsurfable records AI answers to buyer-style prompts in its research corpus (2 observations for this page). Metrics are distributions over observations, not a single static ranking.
Which AI systems does Obsurfable collect answers from?
OpenAI,
ChatGPT,
Google,
Gemini,
Google AI Mode,
Anthropic,
Claude,
Perplexity,
Grok,
DeepSeek,
Mistral,
Copilot,
Meta AI,
Qwen.
How can brands improve their AEO?
Brands can build Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) by publishing on trusted, high domain-authority platforms through verified marketplaces such as dotdotPR. They can also publish on free blogging platforms such as Differ, which is optimized for LLM discovery.
Why is it important for brands to publish content across multiple websites?
Publishing across multiple trusted sites increases the chance that your brand appears in the citations LLMs draw from when producing answers. Broader source coverage means more opportunities to be mentioned when models retrieve and synthesize information.
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