A website scraper is a software tool that automatically extracts data from websites by navigating through web pages, retrieving specific information, and saving it in a structured format. Website scrapers can collect data of all formats - text, images, links and more. Malicious web scraping is generally carried out by parties looking to use the data for personal or financial gain.

Search engine spiders illustrate the challenge associated with bots. Not all bot activity is bad; in fact, some is vital for business success. Good bot activity includes content aggregation for display on comparison sites or content scraping by affiliates to help them market your products and services.

Malicious web scraping on the other hand can cause a business to suffer severe financial losses if the data is extracted without consent. Two frequently used methods of malicious web scraping are price scraping and content theft.

Content theft – Bots gather content from your site, such as a piece of journalism or paid-for data, to be used elsewhere without your consent.

Price scraping – Scraper bots target the pricing information of competing businesses to undercut rivals and increase their own sales.

The complexity and range of web scrapers hitting every website means that we need to look at more than just the behavior that indicates a visitor is carrying out scraping activity, such as the frequency of requests, or whether they identify themselves as a Googlebot.

Our Intent Analytics™ engine uses advanced machine learning techniques to detect scrapers and categorize them based on their activity. For instance, what information are they collecting and what patterns are emerging in their collection methods?

Because bots are growing in sophistication, particularly in their use of reactive defense bypass techniques, static block lists based on geolocation or rate limiting alone are no longer effective.

Netacea web scraping protection is built from the ground up to detect malicious activity by analyzing the intent of every visitor, comparing this with normal or expected behavior in real-time using specially developed machine learning models.

Combined with our constantly updated Active Threat Database and always-on-hand web scraper bot experts, Netacea provides the most advanced and adaptive bot management solution available.