Autonomous Web Scraping with AI: A Config-Driven Approach

From static HTML to AI-driven data collection

A comprehensive guide to modern web scraping: from static HTML extraction to AI-driven autonomous data collection using a declarative JSON config contract.

About This Book

This book teaches you to build a complete, production-ready web scraping system using a declarative JSON configuration approach. Rather than writing custom Python for every target, you express each scraping task as a JSON object that your engine interprets - an approach that scales, composes, and that AI agents can generate autonomously.

The book is structured in five parts:

Part	Theme	What you build
1 · Foundations	Why scraping, rendering, JSON contract	Mental model
2 · Extraction	Selectors, field types, pagination	Config vocabulary
3 · Rendering	Static, Playwright, auto-fallback	Full engine
4 · Scale	Scheduling, storage, change detection	Production ops
5 · AI Agents	Config generation, autonomous loop, MCP	AI-first scraping

The Core Idea

A scraper config is a JSON object that completely specifies a scraping task:

{
  "render_mode": "static",
  "sources": [{
    "url_template": "https://jobs.example.com/listings?page={n}",
    "pagination": {"start": 1, "step": 1, "max_pages": 50}
  }],
  "listing": {
    "link_selector": "a.job-link",
    "link_prefix": "https://jobs.example.com"
  },
  "fields": {
    "title":    {"selector": "h1.job-title",  "retrieve": "plaintext"},
    "company":  {"selector": ".company-name", "retrieve": "plaintext"},
    "salary":   {"selector": ".salary",       "retrieve": "regexp",
                 "pattern": "\\$([\\d,]+)"},
    "tags":     {"selector": ".skill-tag",    "retrieve": "plaintext",
                 "multiple": true}
  }
}

This config drives pagination, link following, field extraction, and regex transforms - without a single line of custom Python.

Companion Repository

All code, demo sites, Jupyter notebooks, and agent implementations are in the GitHub repository.

git clone https://github.com/heldernoid/scrapping
cd scrapping
uv sync
cd demo-sites && docker compose up -d

How to Cite

If you use this book or its accompanying code in your work, please cite:

BibTeX:

@misc{monteiro_2026_19513159,
  author    = {Monteiro, H{\'e}lder},
  title     = {Autonomous Web Scraping with {AI}: A Config-Driven Approach},
  month     = apr,
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.19513159},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19513159}
}

Plain text:

Monteiro, H. Autonomous Web Scraping with AI: A Config-Driven Approach. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19513159