We benchmarked 4 web scraping APIs for AI agents against DataDome, Cloudflare, and Akamai
This article was originally published on the Zenrows blog . This post compares five web scraping APIs for AI agents using 800 benchmark requests against DataDome, Cloudflare, and Akamai. It then shows you how to connect the strongest performer to Claude Desktop, the OpenAI Agents SDK, and LangChain in a few lines of code. The APIs are Zenrows, Firecrawl, Jina AI Reader, CrawlForge, and Bright…
This article benchmarks four web scraping APIs for AI agents against DataDome, Cloudflare, and Akamai. The APIs tested are Zenrows, Firecrawl, Jina AI Reader, CrawlForge, and Bright Data. The study ran 800 requests across Wikipedia and four protected targets on August and August 2026.
Zenrows achieved 100% success rate for all targets, requiring an average of 5,215 ms response time. Jina AI Reader had a 99.33% success rate, with an average response time of 1,257 ms. Firecrawl had a 66.67% success rate, with a 1,497 ms average response time. CrawlForge failed all requests, achieving a 0% success rate, with an average response time of 867 ms.
Every figure in the study was derived from a public benchmark repository, allowing readers to rerun the tests with the raw per-request results. The primary difference between the APIs lies in their ability to bypass anti-bot protections like DataDome, Cloudflare, and Akamai. Zenrows successfully retrieved pages across all protected targets, while Jina AI Reader and Firecrawl generally performed well on unprotected targets but struggled with protected ones. CrawlForge, unfortunately, did not succeed in retrieving any content.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
