Guides · Updated October 2026

Web Scraping Statistics 2026

Hard numbers on web scraping in 2026, anchored by Marquee Data's own October 2026 survey of anti-bot protection on 200 high-traffic consumer websites. Every figure is sourced; journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these statistics with attribution to Marquee Data. Download the raw survey data (CSV).

Anti-bot protection on top websites (Marquee Data survey, October 2026)

Method: a single honest HTTP GET to each of 200 top consumer-facing homepages (20 categories × 10 sites), a current Chrome user-agent, a reputable US ISP proxy, no retries and no evasion. Full methodology in the survey report.

64% of top consumer websites run detectable anti-bot or WAF protection (114 of the 179 sites that responded).
39% refuse even a single plain request outright — a 403/429 or a challenge page on the very first GET (70 of 179).
Counting the 21 sites that never answered the request at all, 46% of the 200 are effectively unreachable to a naive scraper.
Akamai (44 sites) and Cloudflare (41) protect the most top sites, followed by DataDome (10), Imperva (9) and HUMAN/PerimeterX (7).
Ticketing is the most hostile category: 8 of 10 ticketing and events sites block a plain request on sight.
Beauty, pharmacy & grocery was the only category where 10 of 10 sites showed detectable protection.
HTTP 403 Forbidden is the most common refusal: 64 of the 179 responding sites returned it to one polite request.

Demand for web scraping

Google search interest in "web scraping" reached an all-time high in 2026: the 2026 year-to-date average is roughly 38% above the 2025 average and about three times the 2015 level. (Marquee Data analysis of Google Trends monthly data, 2004–2026.)
The AI boom is the newest demand driver: large language models are trained and grounded on web data, and Common Crawl — a web-scraped public dataset — was a major ingredient of the corpora behind modern LLMs.

The economics of scraping in 2026

In our client work we routinely see a 100x spread in cost per record between an unprotected site fetched with plain HTTP and a heavily protected site requiring full browser automation, premium residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling.
The cost drivers stack multiplicatively: browser automation can cost 10–50x the compute of a plain HTTP request, and residential/mobile proxy bandwidth sells at a large premium to datacenter bandwidth.
Raw computing cost per GFLOPS has fallen by orders of magnitude since 2000 — yet scraping budgets keep rising, because anti-bot countermeasures outpace the hardware savings.

Citing these statistics

Cite as: Marquee Data, "Web Scraping Statistics 2026," marqueedata.com, October 2026. The anti-bot figures come from our published survey; the raw per-domain data is free to download and reuse with attribution. For background, see our full educational guide, Web Scraping 101.

Need this done for you?

Marquee Data has built and managed custom web data collection since 2017 — Fortune 500 and hedge-fund clients, 100% US-based senior engineers, fixed fees. You don't pay until you're satisfied with the data.

Tell us about your project or email solutions@marqueedata.com.

← All guides · Web Scraping 101: the complete guide