Definition
Web Scraping
The automated extraction of data from websites, commonly used by AI agents to gather information from the open web.
Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting structured data from websites. AI agents frequently need to scrape web pages to gather research data, monitor competitors, extract product information, or collect training data. In the Mithril ecosystem, services like Firecrawl and Browserbase provide x402-payable web scraping — agents pay per page scraped, with no API keys or subscriptions required. Browserbase provides full cloud browser sessions for JavaScript-heavy sites, while Firecrawl handles simpler extraction.
See also
Related terms
AI Agent
An autonomous software system powered by a large language model that can take actions, use tools, and make decisions to accomplish goals.
API Marketplace
A curated directory of APIs that AI agents can discover, evaluate, and pay for on a per-call basis.
Pay-Per-Call
A pricing model where each individual API call is billed as a separate micro-transaction, rather than through subscriptions or rate-limited tiers.