Web Scraping Made Simple: What It Is and How to Use APIs for web scraping
Engineering

Web Scraping Made Simple: What It Is and How to Use APIs for web scraping

Discover what is web scraping, its legal aspects, common practices, and how to leverage ApyHub’s free APIs for easy, automated data extraction and analysis.
Web Scraping Made Simple: What It Is and How to Use APIs for web scraping
NI
Nikolas Dimitroulakis
Last updated on December 08, 2025

What Is Web Scraping? A Simple Guide for Beginners

Introduction

Web scraping is a method of automatically collecting information from websites. Instead of manually copying data from web pages, web scraping uses software to visit websites and extract the data you need. This can save a lot of time, especially when you need to gather large amounts of information from many pages.

How Does Web Scraping Work?

At its core, web scraping involves these basic steps:
  • Accessing a webpage: The scraper sends a request to a website URL.
  • Downloading the HTML: The website sends back the page’s source code.
  • Extracting useful data: The scraper reads the HTML and finds the specific data you want, like product prices, text content, or links.
  • Saving the data: The extracted data is stored in a format like JSON, CSV, or a database for easy use.

What Is Web Scraping Used For?

Web scraping is useful in many areas, including:
  • Monitoring product prices on e-commerce sites
  • Collecting news articles or reviews
  • Tracking competitors’ information
  • Building datasets for research or machine learning
  • Aggregating public data for analysis
  • Checking availability of services or stocks
Basically, if you want to collect data from many webpages quickly and automatically, web scraping can help.

Is Web Scraping Legal?

Web scraping itself is not illegal. It becomes a legal concern only if:
  • You scrape private or personal data without permission
  • You violate a website’s terms of service
  • You bypass security measures like login or paywalls
  • You cause harm to the website’s servers by sending too many requests
When done responsibly—scraping publicly available information, respecting website rules, and not overwhelming servers—web scraping is generally considered legal.

How Developers Use ApyHub APIs for Web Scraping

Developers often face challenges when building web scrapers, such as handling different website structures, dealing with anti-bot measures, or parsing complex HTML content. ApyHub’s Web Scraping APIs help solve these problems by offering ready-to-use, reliable extraction services.

What Developers Can Do With ApyHub APIs:

  • Extract structured data from any webpage: With a simple API call, developers get page titles, metadata, headings, paragraphs, and links, all in a clean JSON format. This eliminates the need to write complex parsing code.
  • Save development time: Instead of building and maintaining scrapers, developers can rely on ApyHub’s infrastructure to handle website changes and format variations.
  • Focus on data usage, not scraping: Developers can spend more time analyzing or using the data instead of fixing scraping issues.
  • Integrate easily: The API works with any programming language. For example, in Python, a developer can send a GET request with the target URL and receive all relevant page information instantly.
Combine with other APIs: ApyHub offers tools for extracting text from PDFs, detecting keywords, summarizing content, and more. Developers can chain these APIs to build powerful data pipelines.
Scale smoothly: Whether you need data from a few pages or thousands, ApyHub APIs scale automatically without worrying about proxies or server resources.

Example Use Case

A developer wants to monitor competitor product prices daily. Instead of building a custom scraper for each competitor’s site, they use ApyHub’s Web Scraping API to fetch product pages and get structured data like product names, prices, and availability with one API call. The data can then be saved and analyzed automatically.

Conclusion

Web scraping is an essential technique to collect large amounts of data from websites efficiently. For beginners, it might seem complicated, but with tools like ApyHub’s Web Scraping APIs, the process becomes much easier and more reliable.
Developers use ApyHub to extract data quickly, save time, avoid maintenance headaches, and focus on building applications that use data effectively.
If you want to learn more or need help getting started with ApyHub APIs, let me know. I can provide examples, tutorials, or a step-by-step guide tailored to your needs.

Web Scraping FAQ

What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the automated process of extracting data from websites. It helps gather content like text, images, prices, or links quickly without manual copying.
Is web scraping legal?
Yes, web scraping is generally legal when done on publicly available data, respecting website terms, and avoiding private or copyrighted information. Responsible scraping that doesn’t harm the website is key.
Is web scraping illegal?
Web scraping becomes illegal if it involves unauthorized access, violates privacy laws, or ignores website terms of service. Always ensure your scraping activities comply with relevant laws and site policies.
What are web scraping practices to evade blockers?
Common techniques include rotating IP addresses, changing user agents, slowing down request rates, and simulating human behavior. These help avoid getting blocked but should be used responsibly.
What is web scraping software?
Web scraping software refers to tools and libraries that automate data extraction from websites. Examples include Python libraries like BeautifulSoup, Selenium for browser automation, and APIs like ApyHub’s Web Scraping API that simplify scraping with minimal code.
How does web scraping work?
Web scraping works by sending a request to a webpage, downloading its HTML content, parsing the code to find the desired data, and then extracting and saving this data in formats like JSON or CSV.
What is web scraping in Python?
It means using Python libraries such as BeautifulSoup or Scrapy to write scripts that automatically fetch and extract website data.
What is web scraping used for?
Web scraping is used for price monitoring, competitor analysis, news aggregation, data collection for AI, lead generation, and more.
Does Amazon allow web scraping?
Amazon’s terms of service generally prohibit unauthorized scraping. They use strong anti-bot measures, so scraping Amazon without permission can violate their policies and may lead to IP blocking or legal consequences.
How to do web scraping in Java?
Java developers use libraries like Jsoup or tools like Selenium to fetch webpage content and extract data programmatically.
Does ApyHub offer APIs for web scraping?
Yes, ApyHub offers a Web Scraping API that extracts structured data such as titles, metadata, content, and links from any public URL in JSON format. This API makes scraping easier without needing to write complex code.
Are ApyHub APIs free to use?
ApyHub provides 5 free API calls per day for beginners to explore and test their services. This is perfect for small projects or learning purposes.
What other ApyHub APIs support web scraping and data processing?
Alongside the Web Scraping API, ApyHub offers many useful APIs, including:
…and many more for job descriptions, sentiment analysis, resume parsing, and SEO monitoring.
How do developers benefit from using ApyHub APIs?
Developers save time and effort by using ApyHub’s ready-made APIs instead of building scrapers from scratch. The APIs handle different webpage structures, update with site changes, and scale easily, letting developers focus on using the data.
Can I combine ApyHub APIs for advanced workflows?
Absolutely. For example, you can scrape webpage content using the Web Scraping API, analyze keywords with the Analyse Keywords API, and then summarize the content using the Summarize Text API—all integrated into one seamless workflow.