CragData is web intelligence infrastructure: discover domains, crawl pages, extract structured JSON, and explore link graphs—built for AI agents, RAG, and data products.

What is web intelligence?

Web intelligence is the practice of turning the live web into structured, queryable data—graphs, entities, and documents—rather than one-off HTML snapshots.

What is AI-ready data?

JSON designed for models: clean content blocks, metadata, link graphs, and plain-English summaries like context_for_ai that drop into system prompts.

How should AI agents use CragData?

Call GET /graph/domain-context before broad search, pick domains with GET /graph/top-pages, scrape top URLs, then embed. Patterns are in /docs and /llms.txt.

What is live retrieval for AI agents?

Fetching fresh web data at query time instead of relying on frozen training corpora—so answers reflect current pages, pricing, and ecosystem links.

What is RAG web crawling?

Crawling only the URLs that matter for a user question, after planning sources with a graph—so embeddings stay relevant and token spend stays low.

How does distributed crawling work?

Jobs are queued, workers run concurrent fetches with retries and rate limits, and results land in graph tables and JSON exports you pull via API.

How do anti-bot systems work?

Sites use fingerprints, rate limits, and challenges. We rotate strategies, respect robots.txt, backoff on failures, and surface scrapable flags in graph responses.

Why do AI agents need live web crawling?

Models trained on static snapshots cannot see today's pricing, partners, or news. Live crawl + extract keeps agent answers grounded in current pages.

Are static datasets dying for RAG?

For production agents, yes—freshness wins. Snapshots are fine for eval; customer-facing RAG needs scheduled or on-demand live ingestion.

How is CragData different from a scraper library?

We run discovery, queues, crawling, extraction, storage, and APIs as managed infrastructure—not a single-URL fetch you host yourself.

Do you crawl the entire internet?

No. You provide seeds; we discover and crawl within your plan limits and configuration.

What format is the data?

JSON per page (title, content[], links[], metadata) plus graph endpoints for domains, top pages, and hops.

Can I use my own database?

Yes. Pull via REST, export JSONL or Parquet on Developer+, or push events with webhooks into your warehouse.

Do you offer webhooks?

Yes — crawl.completed, discover.completed, page.extracted. Configure HTTPS URLs in Dashboard → Webhooks; payloads are HMAC-signed.

Is there an official SDK?

Python and Node clients live under packages/cragdata-python and packages/cragdata-js in our GitHub repo.

What is a niche graph?

A ranked view of who links to a seed domain, where the seed links out, and related clusters—with niche_score and scrapable flags for agents.

How fast can I integrate?

Most teams send a first /scrape or /graph/domain-context call within 15 minutes using the quickstart at /docs.

What are your rate limits?

Plan-based requests per second; see /docs#errors or GET /me for live caps. Headers include X-Credits-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Limit.

Do you respect robots.txt?

Yes. You are responsible for lawful use; we encourage robots compliance and reasonable crawl rates.

You are responsible for how you use data. Enterprise plans include compliance discussions for sensitive use cases.

Can I monitor competitors?

Yes—seed competitor domains, schedule crawls, and diff structured JSON over time. See /use-cases/competitor-monitoring.

How does crawl orchestration with queues work?

POST /crawl or /discover returns a job_id; workers process the queue; you poll GET /crawl/{job_id} or listen on webhooks.

What is structured extraction?

HTML is normalized to JSON blocks with nav/scripts stripped—ready for search indexes, analytics, or embedding pipelines.

CragData vs Firecrawl?

Firecrawl is strong for page-to-markdown. CragData adds niche graphs and agent-first source planning. See /compare/cragdata-vs-firecrawl.

Apify is an actor marketplace. CragData is an opinionated intelligence API with graphs and managed pipelines. See /compare/cragdata-vs-apify.

What uptime do you target?

Production API at api.cragdata.com with health at /v1/health. Enterprise SLAs available; status practices documented for ops teams.

Do you support always-on crawls?

Yes—Dashboard → Schedules runs recurring discover/crawl jobs for monitoring use cases.

What is context_for_ai?

A plain-English summary in graph responses describing the niche topology—designed to paste into an agent system prompt before retrieval.

Who is CragData built for?

Teams shipping AI agents, RAG products, GTM enrichment, SEO research, and market intelligence who need live structured web data at scale.

May 22, 2026

Web Scraping vs Live Web Intelligence

Why production AI teams outgrow scrape scripts and need managed crawl, graph, and freshness layers.

infrastructure
ai

Web scraping vs live web intelligence

A scraper fetches a URL. Web intelligence plans what to fetch, runs it at scale, structures output, and keeps it fresh for downstream systems.

Scraping alone

One URL at a time
You own queues, retries, storage
No link graph for source planning
Stale the moment you export

Intelligence layer

Discover + crawl + extract pipeline
Niche graphs for agents (/graph/domain-context)
Webhooks and exports to your warehouse
Scheduled freshness for RAG

For AI teams

If your product answers questions about the current web, you need the second model. CragData is the API for that layer.

Documentation · Playground