Decodo, a leading provider of web data infrastructure, has introduced the Web Data API, which puts scraping, mapping, crawling, and search behind a single API key. Designed for AI startups building agents or retrieval pipelines, its single interface delivers fresh, structured web data.
“AI startups don’t have time to build their own scraping infrastructure,” noted Decodo CEO Vaidotas Juknys. “The Web Data API gives them one key for scraping, searching, mapping, and crawling. That’s less time on infrastructure and more time on the product.”
Data Challenge Facing Most AI Agents #
Language models train on a fixed information snapshot. Agents tracking a company, a news feed, or a price list need up-to-date data. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) likewise relies on how fresh the retrieved documents are.
Pulling live pages means running scrapers behind rotating IPs, getting past CAPTCHAs and bot detection, followed by cleaning up incomplete pages and stripping navigation, ads, and boilerplate from whatever comes back. Building this infrastructure or assembling individual tools takes engineering time away from products.
Meet The Web Data API #
Decodo developed the Web Data API to eliminate that additional work, bringing four endpoints on one account and one API key. Separate scraping, search, mapping, and crawling contracts are no longer necessary. Each endpoint addresses a distinct stage in the web data collection process.
- Scrape retrieves a single page’s clean content, even through anti-bot protection.
- Search delivers live web results, replacing the previously offered Fast Search API.
- Map reveals a site’s structure; each call can return up to 147,000 URLs.
- Crawl automatically follows a site’s links, collecting up to 10K pages within a single job.
One Vendor For All 4 Endpoints #
Because the four run on one key, a team gets one invoice, one dashboard, and one place to read usage. Each is supported by Decodo’s proxy network of over 125 million IPs spanning 195+ locations.
It also shortens procurement: one vendor to vet, one support queue for billing and technical questions, one integration for new hires to learn.
How Teams Are Already Using The 4 Endpoints #
The four endpoints are already available for practical workflows tailored to each user’s needs:
- RAG teams convert a documentation site to clean Markdown for embedding through a single crawl job.
- Developers creating coding tools use search to bring live results into an IDE or an agent.
- Legal and research teams locate documents by mapping a regulator’s site before crawling those documents.
- Competitive intelligence teams regularly repeat map and crawl jobs to monitor a rival’s catalog over time.
The best part is that all these workflows run without needing a separate scraping stack.
Start Here #
Decodo provides up to 10,000 free requests per month, with one quota shared by all four endpoints, without requiring a credit card. This quota resets each month, so a team can run a real pilot before deciding on a paid tier.
For AI startups comparing the time and budget needed for in-house scraping infrastructure with licensing it, Web Data API brings page extraction together with search, discovery, and crawling in one integration. The free tier lets teams evaluate how it fits within their existing stack. Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal