The Week Scraping Rebranded for AI

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✓ checked 8 October 2026 · sources: GitHub REST API, pypistats.org, Internet Archive captures of GitHub pages (from our Open-Source Scraping Index), and coverage and announcements dated 29 September to 8 October 2026 · method · caveats · download the data

On 6 October 2026, three web-data companies were in the news for pitching themselves at AI customers. We set those announcements next to what developers are actually starring and downloading. On both stars and downloads, Firecrawl is now ahead of Scrapy, the best-known classic scraping framework.

Read this first. The announcements are the companies’ own descriptions, including any claims to be first. GitHub stars measure attention, not use, and package downloads include automated installs. We cover these companies as a comparison site; none of the links here are affiliate links.

Firecrawl GitHub stars 189,600Scrapy 64,671ratio 2.93×firecrawl-py downloads, last 30 days 5,339,910

Headline numbers

1. Three repositionings in one news day. IT Brief reported ScraperAPI’s purchase of Traject Data: “The expansion targets organisations that need structured public web data for AI systems, automated decision-making and market analysis.” Oxylabs announced MASQUE (HTTP/3) support for residential proxies, describing itself as “Oxylabs, a global web intelligence platform serving biggest AI labs, has announced support for the Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (MASQUE) protocol across its enterprise proxy infrastructure”. Proxyway reported: “As of this week, Rayobyte calls itself the web data collection company priced (our emphasis) for the AI era.”
2. Firecrawl, an AI-oriented scraper first published in April 2024, has 2.93× the GitHub stars of Scrapy, the Python framework that has been around since 2010: 189,600 against 64,671 on 8 October.
3. In two years Firecrawl went from 15,727 stars to 189,600, about 12.1×. Scrapy added 12,110 over the same period. Internet Archive captures show Firecrawl behind Scrapy in April 2025 (33,864 vs 54,717) and ahead by October 2025 (60,748 vs 58,500).
4. Two AI-oriented tools are now downloaded more than Scrapy. In the last 30 days (pypistats, fetched 8 October), PyPI recorded 8,061,974 downloads of browser-use and 5,339,910 of firecrawl-py, against 4,303,709 for scrapy.
5. In the 6.3 days since our 2 October index, the four AI-native tools gained 2,558 stars combined; the six classic scraping and HTTP tools gained 241. Firecrawl alone added 1,817; Scrapy added 121.
6. The ScraperAPI deal was completed earlier in the year. ScraperAPI’s own blog post about it is dated 30 April 2026 and says “A few months ago, ScraperAPI acquired Traject Data”. The October coverage is about the combined product, including AI search monitoring.
7. On its largest plan, Rayobyte’s new Scale residential price is about 52.6 times lower per GB than the starting price of its Premium plan. Its pricing page now reads “Proxies and a Scraping API priced for the AI era”, with Scale residential prices that fall as plans get larger, “larger plans lower the rate, down to $0.0095/GB on the $5,000 plan”. Premium residential starts at $0.50/GB. Proxyway notes that Scale requires at least $100 a month and doesn’t support location filtering.

Stars

Downloads

Firecrawl also has a JavaScript SDK and a hosted API, and Crawlee is mainly a JavaScript library; neither is counted here. Full tables with npm figures are in our Open-Source Scraping Index, updated on 12 October 2026 with jsdom, got-scraping, Camoufox and Chrome traffic ranks for project websites.

The three announcements

ScraperAPI and Traject Data. IT Brief Australia, 6 October: “The expansion targets organisations that need structured public web data for AI systems, automated decision-making and market analysis.” Traject Data’s Wold is quoted: “As AI raises the bar for how much clean web data companies need, that combination matters”. ScraperAPI’s 30 April blog post describes the acquisition as having happened “a few months” before that.

Oxylabs and MASQUE. The press release is datelined 6 October and says Oxylabs is “becoming the first provider to deliver native HTTP/3 and QUIC proxying over a residential proxy network”. That is the company’s claim; we didn’t test it. Rayobyte also lists HTTP/3 support, according to Proxyway. Oxylabs’ own blog post on MASQUE is dated 29 September.

Rayobyte. Proxyway (6 October): “As of this week, Rayobyte calls itself the web data collection company priced (our emphasis) for the AI era.” Prices are from Rayobyte’s pricing page as captured on 8 October. For what home-internet sellers are paid against these per-GB prices, see The Home-Internet Supply Chain.

Method

GitHub. Star counts from the GitHub REST API on 8 October 2026 (fetched 2026-10-08 17:12:29 EDT), compared with the GitHub search API values saved for our Open-Source Scraping Index on 2 October 2026 at 9:35 AM ET. Earlier history comes from Internet Archive captures of each repository page nearest to the target date, as published with the index. Firecrawl moved from mendableai/firecrawl to firecrawl/firecrawl; GitHub redirects the old name.

Downloads. pypistats.org “recent” API, last 30 days, fetched 2026-10-08 17:12:34 EDT. These counts exclude known mirrors but include CI systems and other automated installs.

News. Each article and page was saved on 8 October 2026; every quotation is checked word for word against the saved copy.

Caveats

• Stars are a popularity signal. Firecrawl, Browser Use and Crawl4AI got a lot of attention from AI developers, and a star doesn’t mean someone uses the project.
• Download counts vary by packaging. An SDK that wraps a hosted API (Firecrawl) and a framework you run yourself (Scrapy) aren’t the same kind of product.
• “AI-native” is our grouping, based on how each project describes itself.
• The six-day star change compares two different GitHub endpoints (search, then repository); both report the same counter.
• Company statements, including claims to be first or to serve particular customers, are reported as made.

Download the data

• Stars and downloads (CSV): every tool with group, first-published year, stars on 2 and 8 October, stars gained, PyPI downloads for the last 30 days, and the Firecrawl and Scrapy star history with Internet Archive capture links.

Cite as: ProxyPicker, “The Week Scraping Rebranded for AI”, 8 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/scraping-ai-week/.

Related: Open-Source Scraping Index · The Home-Internet Supply Chain · Bright Data’s Patents by the Numbers · reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile · Proxy provider comparison.

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