Decodo launches unified Web Data API for AI agents

The challenge of live web data

Large language models are typically trained on static snapshots of information, which means they lack awareness of real-time events. For AI agents to be useful in tasks like tracking news feeds, monitoring price lists, or following company updates, they require access to fresh data. This process is often called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, which relies on pulling in current documents to inform the AI's responses.

However, pulling live pages from the internet is technically difficult for developers. They must navigate various hurdles, such as rotating IP addresses to avoid being blocked, solving CAPTCHAs, and bypassing sophisticated bot detection systems. Once the data is successfully retrieved, it often arrives as a messy pile of HTML that requires significant cleaning to remove ads, navigation menus, and other irrelevant boilerplate text.

Building this entire infrastructure from scratch requires substantial engineering time and resources. Many AI startups find themselves spending more time on these backend data hurdles than on developing the actual features of their products. Decodo aims to solve this by providing a pre-built infrastructure that handles the heavy lifting of web data collection automatically.

A unified API for data collection

Decodo has introduced the Web Data API to consolidate four distinct web data tasks into a single interface. Instead of managing separate contracts and keys for different tools, developers can now use one API key to access scraping, mapping, crawling, and search. This unification is intended to simplify the procurement process for companies, as they only need to vet one vendor and manage one support queue for billing and technical issues.

The Scrape endpoint is designed to retrieve the clean content of a single page while navigating through anti-bot protections. The Search endpoint provides live web results, which serves as a replacement for the company's previous Fast Search API. These tools allow developers to get high-quality, structured data without having to write custom code to strip away the noise of the modern web.

For larger-scale discovery, the Map endpoint reveals the structure of a website, with the ability to return up to 147,000 URLs in a single call. The Crawl endpoint then automatically follows those links to collect content, supporting up to 10,000 pages within a single job. By putting all four endpoints behind one dashboard, Decodo allows teams to see their usage and manage their data needs in one place.

How teams use the new endpoints

Different types of AI projects can utilize these four endpoints in specific ways to streamline their workflows. For example, teams working on RAG systems can use a single crawl job to convert an entire documentation site into clean Markdown files. This format is much easier for AI models to embed and reference than raw HTML, making the information more accessible for the agent.

Developers building coding tools can use the search endpoint to bring live results directly into an integrated development environment or an AI agent. This allows the tool to provide up-to-date information to programmers as they work. Meanwhile, legal and research teams can use the map endpoint to identify all relevant documents on a regulator's site before initiating a crawl to gather that specific information.

Competitive intelligence teams also have a use case for these tools by repeating map and crawl jobs on a regular basis. This allows them to monitor a rival's product catalog over time to track changes in pricing or inventory. Because all these workflows run through a single scraping stack, these teams do not need to maintain separate tools for different types of web discovery.

Infrastructure and accessibility

The Web Data API is backed by a massive proxy network that provides over 125 million IPs spanning more than 195 locations. This scale is necessary to ensure that requests remain consistent and are not flagged as malicious by websites. By leveraging this existing network, Decodo provides a level of reliability that would be difficult for most startups to build independently.

To make the tool accessible to new developers, Decodo offers a free tier that includes up to 10,000 requests per month. This quota is shared across all four endpoints, allowing teams to run a pilot project without needing to provide a credit card upfront. The free quota resets every month, giving users a consistent way to test the API's performance and data quality.

The goal of this release is to reduce the time spent on infrastructure and increase the time spent on product development. As Decodo CEO Vaidotas Juknys noted, "The Web Data API gives them one key for scraping, searching, mapping, and crawling." By removing the need to assemble individual tools, the company hopes to help AI startups move faster from the idea phase to a functional, data-rich product.