Kotlin has become a pragmatic choice for JVM-based web scraping because it combines the maturity of the Java ecosystem with a concise, type-safe language and first-class coroutine support. For high-throughput scraping in 2026, the main differentiator is not just raw HTTP speed, but how robustly a system can handle large concurrency, JavaScript-heavy pages, anti-bot protections, and frequent structural changes in target sites.