The hardest websites to scrape in 2026: what the benchmarks show
Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of ScrapeUnblocker, one of the APIs measured below. Every number here has a public source you can check. A lot of websites are still simple to scrape. If you're pulling a blog, a small shop or a public dataset, a normal HTTP request plus a parser is often enough. The work gets very different on the small group of sites that push back: large retailers, travel sites,…
In 2026, scraping certain websites remains a challenging task due to advanced anti-bot systems, data protection measures, and in-house protection developed by major e-commerce and social media platforms. The Proxyway Web Scraping API Report 2025 tested 11 scraping APIs against 15 heavily protected websites, revealing Shein, G2, and Hyatt as the three hardest targets.
These sites had success rates of 21.88%, 36.63%, and 43.75% respectively, with the average commercial scraping API only receiving the correct page roughly one in five times. Factors contributing to a website's difficulty include commercial anti-bot systems, data protection mechanisms, and in-house protection strategies employed by companies like Shein, Amazon, Instagram, and Google.
Established scraping API providers such as Bright Data, Oxylabs, Zyte, ScrapingBee, ZenRows, and ScraperAPI have mature products and big teams, but their pricing models can vary significantly when dealing with protected targets. ScrapeUnblocker, a relatively new player, conducted its own benchmark using Proxyway's 2025 target list and measured a success rate of 97.0% across 14 of the 15 targets.
This demonstrates that while some sites present more significant challenges, a thorough test of individual websites can provide a more accurate assessment of a scraping API's effectiveness.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
