The Challenge of Web Data Extraction
The web is the largest source of publicly available data in the world, but most of it is trapped inside HTML designed for human consumption — not machine processing. Product listings, job postings, real estate data, news articles, and countless other datasets exist on websites but are not available through APIs. Extracting this data traditionally requires writing custom web scraping code, which is time-consuming and fragile.
Web scraping involves fetching HTML from a URL, parsing the DOM tree, and extracting the specific elements you need using CSS selectors or XPath expressions. The code breaks whenever the website changes its layout, class names, or structure — which happens frequently. Maintaining scrapers is an ongoing burden that often costs more than building them in the first place.
Traditional Scraping vs AI Extraction
Traditional web scraping relies on brittle selectors tied to specific HTML structures:
// Traditional scraping — breaks when HTML changes
const titles = document.querySelectorAll(".product-card h2.title");
const prices = document.querySelectorAll(".product-card .price-tag span");
const ratings = document.querySelectorAll(".product-card .stars-count");
// If the site changes ".price-tag span" to ".cost-display",
// your entire scraper breaks.AI-powered extraction takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of relying on specific CSS selectors, it understands the semantic meaning of content on the page. It can identify product names, prices, ratings, and descriptions regardless of how the HTML is structured. This makes it far more resilient to website changes.
How PulpMiner Extracts Structured Data
The Website to JSON tool uses AI to convert any webpage into clean, structured JSON data. Here is how to use it:
- Enter the URL of any public webpage you want to extract data from.
- Describe what you want — tell the AI what data to extract, such as "product names and prices" or "article titles and publish dates."
- Get structured JSON — the tool returns clean, well-formatted JSON with the exact data you requested.
- Download or copy the JSON for use in your application, spreadsheet, or database.
The output is clean, consistent JSON that you can immediately use in your application:
{
"products": [
{
"name": "Wireless Bluetooth Headphones",
"price": "$49.99",
"rating": 4.5,
"reviews": 1283
},
{
"name": "USB-C Hub Adapter",
"price": "$29.99",
"rating": 4.2,
"reviews": 856
}
]
}Use Cases for Website Data Extraction
Price Monitoring
E-commerce businesses track competitor pricing to stay competitive. Instead of manually checking dozens of websites, you can extract product prices into JSON and build automated price comparison dashboards.
Lead Generation
Business directories, event attendee lists, and company websites contain contact information that can be extracted and structured for outreach campaigns. Extract names, titles, companies, and contact details into a JSON array, then convert to CSV for your CRM.
Research and Analysis
Researchers often need to collect data from multiple sources — government databases, academic listings, news sites — and combine them for analysis. Extracting to JSON provides a uniform format that can be processed programmatically.
Content Aggregation
News aggregators, job boards, and listing sites can pull data from multiple sources into a single feed. AI extraction handles the variety of different website layouts without needing custom scrapers for each source.
Benefits Over Manual Scraping
The AI-powered approach has several advantages over writing scraping code from scratch. There is no code to write or maintain, so you can start extracting data in seconds rather than hours. The AI understands page context, so it works across different website layouts without adjustment. And because there are no CSS selectors to break, you are not constantly fixing scrapers when websites update their designs.
Ready to extract data from any website? Try the Website to JSON tool and get structured data in seconds.