Or Lenchner, the CEO of Vivid Data, considered one of the world’s largest web-scraping firms, says that his company’s bots don’t collect nonpublic information. Vivid Data was previously sued by Meta and X for allegedly improperly scraping content from their platforms. (Meta later dropped its suit, and a federal judge in California dismissed the case brought by X.)
Karolis Stasiulevičiu, a spokesperson for an additional cited company, ScrapingBee, told WIRED: “ScrapingBee operates on considered one of the Web’s core principles: that the open web is supposed to be accessible. Public web pages are, by design, readable by each humans and machines.”
Oxylabs, one other scraping firm, said in an unsigned statement that its bots don’t have “access to content behind logins, paywalls, or authentication. We require customers to make use of our services just for accessing publicly available information, and we implement compliance standards throughout our platform.”
Oxylabs added that there are a lot of legitimate reasons for firms to scrape web content, including for cybersecurity purposes and to conduct investigative journalism. The corporate also says that the countermeasures some web sites use don’t discriminate between different use cases. “The truth is that many modern anti-bot systems don’t distinguish well between malicious traffic and legit automated access,” Oxylabs says.
Along with causing headaches for publishers, the web-scraping wars are creating latest business opportunities. TollBit’s report found greater than 40 firms which are now marketing bots that may collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered engines like google, in addition to tools like OpenClaw, are likely helping drive up demand for these services.
Some firms promise to assist firms surface content for AI agents fairly than attempt to block them, a technique often known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. “We’re essentially seeing the rise of a brand new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, an organization that optimizes content in order that it appears prominently in AI tools.
“This may only intensify in 2026, and we’re going to see this rollout type of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni says.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
