Information is power, and it comes with great responsibility. Today, the competitive advantage that companies can gain by having up-to-date information means the ability to provide a better value proposition for all their customers or expand their customer base. To ensure they can keep themselves up to date or lead, many companies scrape the internet for data, data that can provide valuable insight into their audiences, their online habits and the data trail they often leave behind.
What is web scraping?
Scraping is an open-source intelligence (OSINT) technique that automates the extraction and analysis of large volumes of information from the internet. This process allows companies to collect data from websites or social networks — through tools, extensions and libraries — to conduct market research, identify trends and analyze brand positioning and competition.
According to Cloudflare’s Radar platform, bot traffic exceeded that of human web traffic with approximately 57.4% of web traffic driven by bots, while 42.6% remains human as of June 2026. Within those statistics sit another important consideration; according to the Thales Bad Bot Report 2026, malicious bot traffic made up approximately 40% of total bot traffic in 2025.
Within these huge volumes of scraped data and content, however, sit cybercriminals who also use these same techniques to obtain valuable content and sensitive data and often work to breach the security of organizations. With that in mind, it is necessary to take measures to reduce risks to your organization or your person.
Legality and ethics of scraping
In theory, the use of scraping tools, extensions or libraries is not illegal. However, this depends on the purpose and use of this information. For example, if a company publishes the prices of its products in its marketplace, it is legal to obtain this data using tools and browser extensions. But, when scraping is used to collect personal and intellectual property data, it can become a malicious practice and violate privacy laws.
Although it would be legal to obtain such data, under personal data protection laws, it would be illegal to publish this sensitive personal information, accidentally or not. It is important to note that just because data or information is publicly available does not mean that it is always legal or ethical to use scraping.
Most popular uses for scrapers:
- Price monitoring
- Social media content
- News and industry-specific news
How malicious scraping can affect a business
Malicious scraping can impact the organization whose data was published, both in terms of legal implications and associated security risks.
The main ways in which malicious scraping can affect a company are:
Privacy breach: A cybercriminal may be able to collect personal data without the owner’s consent, regardless of whether it is public due to an oversight on the part of the publisher.
Fraud and scams: The information obtained can be used to create fake profiles, to make financial fraud more effective by increasing their personalization (spear phishing) and subsequently to carry out social engineering attacks.
Performance on scraping sites: By entering and consuming portal or social network resources, increased web traffic can have a negative impact on web resource performance, causing sites to slow down or become temporarily unavailable.
Reputational damage: Obtaining personal data can be used for malicious purposes, such as damaging a company’s reputation, which can lead to a loss of customers due to distrust in how that information was exposed and collected. These can have lasting impact on both legal and financial issues.
What can agencies do to minimize scraping on their websites?
It is important to have techniques and best practices in place to minimize the impact of this malicious practice and reduce its impact, and there are techniques and best practices that should be taken into account. Among them, the main ones are:
IP address blocking: Most cloud providers allow their customers to monitor the IP addresses that visit their sites, in order to identify whether in a specific period of time an unusual amount of traffic is generated from a particular IP address (traffic generated by some scrapers or bots) and potentially blocking it completely. However, this control can be overcome if the bots or scrapers have the possibility to change their IP address through a proxy or VPN, although this would require a greater effort in their programming and is something that cybercriminals often do not do.
Correct configuration of the “robots.txt” file: Most of the pages on the internet contain a file called “robots.txt,” which tells search engines such as Google or Bing what resources they can access from the web page, for example, control access to image files or block access to resources or directories that may be private, giving better control. In the case of scrapers, these can be restricted within this file.
Filtering of requests by means of agents: When a site is visited, a request is being made to enter an HTML page from the server. This request is accompanied by identifying factors such as the IP address and the user agent. This request is accompanied by identification factors such as the IP address and the user agent, which contains information about the device and software being used to access the web page, including the application name, version, operating system and language. Similarly, most cloud providers allow filtering through the user agent and access to information on a web page; in the case of scrapers, these can be limited if they are identified from a certain IP, browser version or operating system.
Use of CAPTCHA: CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” This security test is used to verify that a user is human and not a bot or an automated program, which would prevent a scraper from obtaining large volumes of information so quickly and easily.
Use of honeypots: In IT, a common practice is to create fake services, such as a web server or database, that are prone to attack. When cybercriminals fall for the trap and attack, honeypots collect and analyze the attack data. The data is used to obtain information about the attacks and where they came from. This information is used to prepare real systems for potential threats such as scrapers.
Digital hygiene and awareness: Just as there are good habits and practices in the real world, they also exist in the digital world. These allow users to protect personal information against cyber threats, among which are to publish the minimum necessary info on official pages for the business to continue. If you are aware and take appropriate measures to protect access or disclosure of personal information on websites exposed to others (names and phone numbers of employees, as well as emails or extensions to name a few examples), users can minimize the impact of a cybercriminal using scrapers to get hold of it. Finally, raising awareness among users, regardless of their level in the organization chart, is fundamental to identify the risks that exist when uploading and consulting information on different internet sites.
Conclusion
Scraping can be a fundamental tool for companies to improve their value proposition and benefit their customers. However, depending on the approach and purpose for which it is used, this practice may be classified as legal or illegal.
When organizations fail to adopt adequate security measures and implement best practices to protect themselves and their content including: data, resources or intellectual property from malicious actors, the publication of that strategic and sensitive content can lead to more sophisticated frauds and scams. This, in turn, generates distrust among users and can result in significant financial losses.
In cases where businesses may employ web scraping legally, there remain multiple legal compliance concerns that demand specific attention as well as a persistent need for strict editorial measures and content control measures.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What does web scraping mean?
Web scraping is a broad term for multiple techniques used for the automated extraction of any data from public-facing websites.
What does content scraping mean?
Content scraping is when automated bots copy text, images, prices or other material from your website or social media profile at scale, usually without permission. Unlike a search-engine crawler that indexes your pages, a scraper extracts your content to reuse, republish or exploit it elsewhere.
Is content scraping the same as web scraping?
Content scraping is a type of web scraping. However, web scraping is the broad technique of extracting any data from sites; content scraping refers specifically to lifting a site’s published material — articles, images, listings, prices — usually to reuse it without permission.
Is web scraping illegal?
Scraping web pages isn’t automatically illegal, but due to the fact that this is almost always an entirely automated activity, the risk of copying and reproducing copyrighted content, harvesting personal data or ignoring a site’s terms of service can lead to breaches of copyright, privacy and computer-misuse laws. “Publicly available” never means “free to take and reuse.”
Is content scraping illegal?
As with web scraping, it can be. While scraping public pages isn’t automatically illegal, copying copyrighted content, harvesting personal data or ignoring a site’s terms of service can breach copyright, privacy and computer-misuse laws. Those risks are even higher if the scraped content is fed to large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate “new” content. Without significant editorial review to prevent plagiarism or other violations, cheap and easy results gained by content scraping can become expensive very quickly.
What’s an example of content scraping?
A competitor’s bot copying your entire product catalog and prices to undercut you (price scraping); a spam site republishing your articles word-for-word; or a bot harvesting employee names and emails from your site to build phishing target lists are types of content scraping.
How do I know if my site is being scraped?
Watch for the signatures: traffic spikes from one IP or range, requests far faster than a human could browse, odd or missing user agents, hits on pages in an unnatural sequence and sudden bandwidth jumps. Server logs, rate monitoring and bot-management tools surface the pattern.
How do I stop content scraping?
No single control stops a determined scraper, so layer several defenses: monitor and rate-limit traffic, block suspicious IPs and user agents, add CAPTCHAs on sensitive endpoints, use honeypots and deploy a bot-management or web application firewall (WAF) layer — then publish only what you need to. A robots.txt file asks bots to behave but won’t stop the malicious ones.
How do I stop web scraping?
There are a number of ways you can limit web scraping. Good practice should prioritize use of a layered approach. For example, add robots.txt rules to discourage crawlers and deploy a WAF to detect and block bots. Address other layers to minimize scraping via rate limiting and CAPTCHAs. Also, it is useful to monitor for suspicious traffic and protect your most valuable content behind logins or paywalls. Seeking an absolute halt to scraper activity is likely costly and an incredibly time-intensive goal.
Where should I begin?
Evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your content and prioritize usage of the suggested controls to reduce automated data extraction and AI crawlers access where it counts the most.
