Whereas manual rule-based data extraction is a long and tedious process, the introduction of AI enabled maintenance-free approaches. Besides its primary purpose of data extraction for business insights, web scraping is also used to accumulate training material for AI-based adaptive parsing.

With the help of machine learning models, AI-assisted web scrapers can retrieve and process content from hundreds of thousands of pages in seconds to generate business strategies and forecasts without being explicitly programmed to do so.

This white paper provides a comprehensive overview of how AI and its subfield, machine learning, shape the current trends in web data extraction and processes that precede it. AI assistance is just as valuable in bypassing anti-scraping measures (such as in our own Web Unblocker) as it is instrumental in the subsequent data structuring.