Zyte Publishes 2026 Web Scraping Industry Report

Zyte, the Ireland-based provider of web scraping tools and services, has published its 2026 Web Scraping Industry Report. 

Zyte’s whitepaper describes six key trends shaping web data collection; it overviews their impact and provides actionable recommendations for staying apace with the striding industry. 

To briefly summarize them:

1. The web scraping stack is being increasingly bundled into unified tools – APIs, making individual components like proxy servers less capable or rational to manage in-house. 
2. AI now sits across the entire scraping lifecycle, whether as LLM-based data parsers, machine learning unblocking algorithms, or code generators. 
3. End-to-end automation will become the default for web scraping pipelines: we’ll have an agent orchestrating specialized sub-agents, with humans designing rather than implementing the process.
4. Manual access strategies will become unsustainable at scale, giving way to machine learning on both sides of the equation: bots and bot detection tools. 
5. Web traffic will divide into access lanes, establishing a hostile, negotiated, or invited relationship with websites. New standards and authentication protocols will grant preferential access to select entities. 
6. Legal clarity is arriving with compliance demands in the shape of California’s Assembly Bill 2013, the EU AI Act, and other legislation. Enterprises are treating data provenance and compliance systems as increasingly important.