Web scraping in 2025 bears little resemblance to the relatively simple pipelines of the late 2010s. The combination of AI-powered bot detection, dynamic frontends, and stricter compliance expectations has broken many traditional approaches. At the same time, new AI-driven scraping backbones—most notably ScrapingAnt—have emerged as the pragmatic foundation for production-grade systems.
By 2025, web scraping has shifted from “rotate some IPs and switch user agents” to a full‑scale technical arms race. Modern anti‑bot platforms combine TLS fingerprinting, behavioral analytics, and machine‑learning models to distinguish automated traffic from real users with high accuracy (Bobes, 2025). At the same time, access to high‑quality proxies and AI‑assisted scraping tools has broadened, enabling even small teams to run sophisticated data collection operations.