Start using Web Scraper API

A quick-start guide for making your first request and using Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API.

Create an API user

Begin by creating an account on the Oxylabs dashboard. After that, select a pricing plan or pick a free trial and create an API user. Your credentials will be your key for user authorization later on.

Make a cURL request

After creating a user, you'll see a few code examples to test your Web Scraper API. Copy-paste the code into your terminal or preferred tool. For manual testing, we recommend using Postman. You can start scraping Amazon, Google, or any other target right away. Here are the cURL examples for your first request:

Amazon:

curl ''https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries'' --user 'USERNAME:PASSWORD' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"source": "amazon_product", "query": "B07FZ8S74R", "geo_location": "90210", "parse": true}'

Google:

curl ''https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries'' --user 'USERNAME:PASSWORD' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"source": "google_search", "query": "adidas", "geo_location": "California,United States", "parse": true}'

Other:

curl ''https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries'' --user 'USERNAME:PASSWORD' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"source": "universal", "url": "https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/"}'

Replace the USERNAME and PASSWORD with the API credentials you’ve just created, and then run the request via terminal, Postman, or any other setup.

See this short video tutorial demonstrating how to use Web Scraper API:

Test our Web Scraper API in the Playground, which is accessible via the dashboard.

Integration methods

There are three different methods you can use to integrate Web Scraper API:

• Realtime – provides a synchronous method where you have to keep the connection open until the job is finished.

• Push-Pull – enables an asynchronous method where you’ll have to make another request to the API to retrieve results once the job is finished.

• Proxy Endpoint – offers a synchronous method where you can use our endpoint as a proxy.

For more information, please refer to the respective integration pages on our documentation or this comprehensive blog post.

Targets and parameters

Web Scraper API can effectively gather public data from any website, including e-commerce, search engines, online travel agencies, real estate platforms, and others. Visit documentation to learn more about the parameters you can use and see code examples.

For using features such as JavaScript rendering and user agents, explore the Features pages in our documentation.

Additional free features

If you want to extend the API functionality in your projects, you can use the following features integrated into Web Scraper API:

• OxyCopilot – generates ready-to-use code for web scraping in seconds. This feature can be accessed via API Playground on our dashboard. We also have a collection of pre-made prompts and code samples to help you get public data from different targets even faster. It’s always available for you in the OxyCopilot prompts and code samples library.

• Headless Browser – renders JavaScript and lets you define custom browser instructions, such as entering text, clicking elements, scrolling pages, and more.

• Custom Parser – enables you to create your own parsing and data processing logic that’s executed on a raw scraping result.

• Scheduler – provides a way for you to automate recurring scraping and parsing tasks by creating schedules.

• Browser instructions – allows you to automate browser actions – like clicking, scrolling, filling out forms, or waiting for elements – before extracting data from a webpage. The feature is accessible in the API playground.

• XHR request capturing – extract the required data from Fetch/XHR requests as structured JSON data while loading the web page, rather than parsing the HTML.

• Markdown output – request markdown output as an alternative, easy-to-read option to HTML or parsed JSON results, best for AI workflows.

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