Web data collection
Articles from the Zyte blog about Web data collection.
Introducing Zyte MCP: Powerful web data gathering for your agent
Zyte MCP brings live web access, structured extraction and Scrapy Cloud operations into coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.
CAPTCHA is more than just a puzzle piece
The famously awkward security mechanism has quietly become an invisible behavioral scoring system. Two vendors enable 89% of CAPTCHAs, and the smallest sites use it most.
Inside antibot, the arms race you can't see
Only 18.5% of top sites run dedicated antibot, but every one of them chose to. Why it's the most intentional barrier in the stack, and the strongest signal of a hardened site.
Firewalls run the web, just not on purpose
Web Application Firewalls run on 92.4% of the top websites, but most arrived bundled with a CDN and were never tuned to resist automated access.
Spider monitoring made easy
How do you know you're collecting all the data you need? And how can you be sure it's actually what you were expecting? Use Spidermon.
Data is the new water
For 20 years, we were told “data is the new oil”. That’s no longer true. In the era of the fluid web, information is more fundamental, cleaner and abundant than that.
Brand visibility in the digital era: How web data help brands see the full picture
Discover how web data helps brands improve visibility, track competitors, monitor availability, and analyze reviews to win on the digital shelf.
How online retailers use web data to compete on price, promotion, and availability
Discover how retailers leverage web data to optimize pricing, track competitor stock, detect trends, and improve sales performance.
How web data turns e-commerce listings into retail intelligence
Discover how web data enables digital shelf analytics vendors to track prices, availability, and product trends at scale—fueling real-time retail intelligence and competitive advantage.
Why your API responses look like gibberish: the gzip decompression trap
The script was working. Requests were going out, responses were coming back with HTTP 200. But the response body was unreadable noise, a wall of binary characters that crashed the JSON parser and reported "no data found". No error code, no timeout, no network failure; just garbage where structured data should be.
Super-powers, toll booths and the new era of data collection
Explore how AI is transforming web scraping, the rise of advanced anti-bot systems, and what the future holds for data collection in an increasingly controlled internet.
Beyond text: Unlocking value on the multimedia web
The web is about more than the written word. Why companies are racing to harness the power of video, audio and pictures.