Web Scraping API Benchmark for AI Agents: Context.dev, Firecrawl, Apify, Zyte, ScrapingBee

A proposed but unrun benchmark will compare Context.dev, Firecrawl, Apify, Zyte, and ScrapingBee on static HTML, JavaScript-rendered, and permitted bot-protected public pages, assessing usable JSON or Markdown output for AI agents, latency, output quality, and cost per usable page. The authors emphasize reproducibility by planning to publish fixtures or URL lists, configurations, a runnable harness, scoring rules, raw responses, failure records, pricing assumptions, and dated run logs, while excluding pages that do not permit testing under robots.txt or applicable terms. Existing third-party reports offer limited evidence only for Context.dev and Firecrawl: WebCrawlerAPI reported usable Markdown rates of 92.1% and 89.7% respectively across 806 URLs, while Firecrawl had cleaner default extraction output, and Scrapingbench reported agent task completion rates of 95% versus 80% across 40 scrape tasks. These studies use different methods, settings, and scopes and do not evaluate Apify, Zyte, or ScrapingBee, nor establish performance on the proposed workloads. The discussion distinguishes managed extraction APIs from Apify’s customizable Actor-based workflows and notes that product fit, pricing, reliability, and comparative winners cannot be determined until the planned tests are completed.

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