NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK – 14/12/2025 – (SeaPRwire) – As artificial intelligence accelerates global demand for real-time digital intelligence, the infrastructure powering web data access has quietly become a critical backbone of the modern economy. Against this backdrop, Proxyway—an independent reviewer and research authority on web scraping infrastructure—has published its 2025 annual report on web data APIs, offering an in-depth assessment of how today’s leading solutions perform under real-world, production-scale conditions.
The report examines the ability of major web scraping APIs to reliably access more than a dozen highly protected websites while operating at scale. In parallel, it explores how the rapid commercialization of AI is reshaping the web data collection landscape. As Proxyway co-founder Adam Dubois observes, the industry now finds itself “at the center of a trillion-dollar gold rush,” driven by unprecedented demand for structured, high-quality web data.
Designed for organizations that depend on external data sources, the report provides practical insights for companies operating in e-commerce, market intelligence, and AI model training and deployment. It also serves as a comprehensive introduction for readers seeking to understand the current state of the web scraping ecosystem, its key players, and the strategic forces likely to shape its future.
A core component of the study is Proxyway’s unblocking benchmark, which evaluated 11 leading web scraping APIs, including Zyte, Oxylabs, Firecrawl, and ScraperAPI. These services were tested against 15 target websites, ranging from foundational data sources such as Google and Amazon to platforms protected by advanced anti-bot technologies like DataDome and PerimeterX. The benchmark also incorporated emerging data targets, including ChatGPT and YouTube, reflecting the evolving priorities of data consumers.
To mirror enterprise-level usage, Proxyway simulated production workloads equivalent to nearly 26 million requests per month. The results highlight a widening performance gap within the market: only four APIs achieved success rates above 80% across the tested targets. Among the most resistant sites, Shein, G2, and Hyatt demonstrated particularly strong defenses against automated data extraction.
Beyond performance metrics, the report analyzes the broader industry transformation triggered by the AI boom. A surge of venture capital has fueled the rise of a new generation of U.S.-based web data companies, intensifying competition and pushing established providers to rapidly evolve their offerings and market positioning. According to the findings, leading platforms are now growing at approximately 50% year over year, with at least one provider reaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025.
Despite shifts in AI adoption from model training toward agent-driven interactions, demand for large-scale and multimodal web data remains robust. At the same time, the report underscores a shared industry reality: web scraping is becoming increasingly challenging. The expansion of the bot-mitigation ecosystem, combined with heightened enforcement efforts by companies such as Google and Cloudflare, continues to raise the technical and operational barriers to unauthorized data access.
source https://newsroom.seaprwire.com/technologies/2025-web-data-api-benchmark-reveals-winners-and-weaknesses-in-large-scale-scraping/




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