Every business eventually needs data it can’t easily get. Competitor prices. Lead contact info. Public reviews. Job listings. Social media profiles.
The traditional answer is a web scraper — a program that visits websites and extracts structured data automatically. The problem? Building and maintaining scrapers is a full engineering project: you need proxies, headless browsers, rate-limit handling, captcha bypassing, output parsing, and a place to run it all.
There’s a simpler way.
What a web scraper actually does
A scraper does three things:
- Fetches a URL (sometimes by simulating a real browser)
- Parses the HTML or JS-rendered DOM to find the data you want
- Returns that data in a structured format (JSON, CSV, etc.)
Modern websites make this harder than it used to be. They use JavaScript rendering, bot-detection layers, rate limits, and CAPTCHAs. A production-grade scraper has to handle all of this — which is why “just write a quick Python script” often turns into a weeks-long engineering project.
The marketplace approach
Instead of building a scraper, you can call one as an API worker.
On Seek API, a scraping worker is a pre-built, production-hardened function that accepts a URL (or a set of parameters) and returns structured data. Someone else already solved the rendering, the proxies, the retries. You just call it.
curl -X POST https://api.seek-api.com/v1/workers/linkedin-profile-scraper/jobs \
-H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"profileUrl": "https://linkedin.com/in/example"}'
You get back a job ID. When the job completes (usually in 1–5 seconds), you fetch the result:
{
"name": "Jane Smith",
"headline": "VP of Product at Acme Corp",
"location": "San Francisco, CA",
"skills": ["Product Management", "B2B SaaS", "GTM Strategy"],
"email": "[email protected]"
}
No proxy setup. No browser installation. No maintenance when LinkedIn changes its layout.
What types of data can you scrape?
Worker scrapers exist for dozens of use cases:
| Data type | Example worker | Output |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn profiles | linkedin-profile-scraper | Name, email, skills, experience |
| Google Maps listings | google-maps-extractor | Name, address, phone, rating |
| Social media posts | tiktok-scraper, instagram-analyzer | Views, likes, content, author |
| E-commerce prices | price-tracker | SKU, price, stock status |
| News & articles | news-extractor | Title, body, author, date |
| Job listings | job-board-scraper | Title, company, salary, URL |
How pricing works
Workers charge per run, not per month. A LinkedIn profile scrape might cost $0.005. A Google Maps extraction might be $0.006. You put credits on your account, and they debit as you use.
There’s no seat pricing, no minimum commitment, no annual contract. If you scrape 200 profiles this month and zero next month, you pay only for the 200.
Legal considerations
Web scraping is legal when you’re accessing publicly available data — profiles, prices, listings, and content that anyone can see without logging in. Scraping private data, bypassing authenticated sessions, or violating a site’s terms of service is a different matter.
All workers on the Seek API marketplace target publicly accessible data only. If a scraper requires login credentials or bypasses access controls, it won’t be accepted.
Getting started
- Sign up for a free account — no credit card required
- Browse the marketplace and find a scraping worker
- Read the worker’s input schema (what parameters it accepts)
- Make your first API call
You’ll have structured data in your hands in under 5 minutes.