Competitive intelligence team using an AI agent to track pricing
The AI employee scrapes competitor pages on a schedule and reports changes. No manual checking.
Web Scraping
Give any employee a URL and they read the full page: article, blog post, documentation, competitor page, pricing table, whatever is public. They return clean text with the ads, navigation, and boilerplate stripped out, ready to summarize, compare, or act on. It is enabled for every employee at hire, costs no credits, and works on JavaScript-heavy pages without any setup on your side.
When you need more than search results, the web scraper goes deeper. It visits specific pages, extracts structured data, and delivers clean content: product listings, pricing tables, contact directories, job postings, article archives. Ask your employee to "pull all pricing from competitor X's website" and it returns a structured table, not raw HTML.
The crawler goes further. Point it at a domain and it follows links across the site, respects rate limits, and builds a complete map of the content. Perfect for competitive audits where you need to understand an entire website. Your employee crawls, extracts, and summarizes hundreds of pages into an actionable brief.
Scraping and crawling work together with other skills. Your employee can scrape competitor pricing, compare it against your own catalog in Google Sheets, draft a pricing strategy memo, and post the summary to your Slack channel. The data flows from extraction to action without manual steps.
There is nothing to switch on and nothing to budget for. Every employee has the reader from the day it is hired, it needs no setup or account of its own, and using it costs no credits. Sending an employee off to read something is never a spending decision, which is what makes it reasonable to say go and check rather than go and guess.
Modern websites are awkward to read, so the reader does not rely on a single method. A fast text pass runs on every page, and when a page turns out to be built mostly by JavaScript a full browser render runs on top of it and the richer result wins. If you have paired the desktop companion, a page that still refuses can be opened in a real browser on your own machine as a last resort, which is what gets you past sites that turn automated visitors away.
It reads public pages, and it is honest about the ones it cannot. A page behind a login, or a site that blocks automated visitors and cannot be reached any other way, comes back as a clear failure the employee tells you about instead of a plausible answer it invented. Very long pages are trimmed with a note saying so. Checking that you are allowed to read what you asked for stays your call.
Extract Structured Data From Any Website
Sistava gives your AI employee the ability to scrape and parse web pages, pulling out the specific data you need in a structured format. Whether it is product prices, contact information, job listings, or research data, the agent extracts and organizes it without manual copying.
Web scraping as an agent tool means you can combine it with other capabilities in a single task. Scrape a list of companies, look up each one, pull contact details, and push them into a CRM, all delegated to your AI employee as one instruction.
Crawl Entire Domains, Not Just Single Pages
The web crawler capability lets your AI employee traverse multi-page sites, following links to collect data across an entire domain. Instead of scraping one URL at a time, the agent can map and extract content from a full website structure.
This is useful for comprehensive research tasks: auditing a competitor's full product catalog, collecting all press mentions from a publications archive, or indexing a documentation site for later reference. The agent handles pagination and link-following automatically.
Clean Output Ready for Downstream Use
Scraped data is parsed and cleaned before the agent uses it. The agent strips navigation menus, ads, and irrelevant page furniture, delivering only the content you actually need. Output can be passed to other tools, written to a document, or pushed to an external system.
Combining the web scraper with API endpoints or OAuth app integrations gives you a full pipeline: scrape the source, transform the data, write it to your destination system. Your AI employee handles the entire chain.
How It Works
Your AI agents extract structured data from any public website and return clean, organized output ready to act on.
Point your AI employee at a URL and describe what you want extracted. It navigates the page, identifies the relevant content, and returns structured data: tables, lists, contact details, pricing, product specs, or any repeating pattern on the page. No HTML parsing, no XPath selectors, no code. The agent handles the extraction logic itself.
For multi-page data sets, the crawler follows pagination links and gathers results across an entire domain or directory. You can run scraping as a one-off task or schedule it to run daily and save results to Drive. The output is clean enough to load directly into a spreadsheet, a database, or a report. Your AI agent turns any public web page into a structured data source.
Reading is a step, not a destination. In one instruction an employee can read three competitor pages, line the numbers up in a spreadsheet, write the summary, save it to Drive, and message you the two things that actually changed since last week. Where the reading fits in that sequence is the employee's decision, so you describe the outcome you want rather than the order of operations to get there.
Use Cases
Research team extracting structured data from public sources
The agent visits target pages, pulls the data, and formats it for analysis. Hours of manual work handled automatically.
Sales team equipping an AI employee with company data before outreach
The agent scrapes a prospect's website before the meeting and prepares a briefing with current context.
Operations team automating data collection from supplier portals
The AI employee visits portals, extracts the relevant information, and logs it, without any manual steps.
Comparison
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Collecting data from websites is manual, slow, and inconsistent. | The AI agent scrapes and structures web data automatically. |
| Web data is only as fresh as the last time someone checked manually. | The agent scrapes on demand and always returns current information. |
| Extracting structured data from pages requires developer support. | The AI employee handles scraping as a standard part of its workflow. |
| Monitoring multiple sites for changes is a full-time task. | The AI agent tracks and reports changes automatically. |
FAQ
What is the difference between web search and web scraping?
Web search finds relevant pages across the internet based on a query. Web scraping extracts specific content from one or more pages the agent visits directly. They work well together: search to find the right pages, then scrape to extract structured data from them.
Can the AI agent scrape pages that require JavaScript to render?
Yes. The scraper supports JavaScript-rendered pages, which covers most modern web applications and single-page apps. Static HTML pages are also supported and processed faster.
Are there limitations on which sites can be scraped?
The agent respects standard scraping boundaries. Sites that block automated access or require authentication beyond what the agent has may not be scrapable. You are responsible for ensuring your scraping use cases comply with the target site's terms of service.
How does the crawler know when to stop?
You can configure crawl depth and scope, such as limiting the crawler to a specific subdomain or a maximum number of pages. Without limits, the agent applies reasonable defaults to avoid unbounded crawls.
Can my AI employee extract data from websites automatically?
Yes. The web scraper lets your AI agent visit any URL and pull structured data from the page as part of a workflow. It works without you needing to build or maintain a separate scraping pipeline.
Do I need to set anything up before my AI employee can read a web page?
No. The web scraper is switched on for every Sistava employee from the day it is hired, with no account, key, or configuration of its own. Paste a link into the conversation, or describe the page you want read, and the employee goes and reads it.
Does reading a web page use up my credits?
Reading the page itself costs no credits in Sistava. You spend credits on the thinking the employee does with what it read, the summary, the comparison, the draft, exactly as you would for any other work. That is why telling an employee to go and check is a cheap instruction.
Can my AI employee read a page that is behind a login?
Not on its own. The web scraper reads public pages, so anything sitting behind a sign-in wall comes back as a failure it reports rather than a guess. If the content lives in an app you have connected, ask the employee to use that connection instead, which is the supported way in.
We scrape 200 job postings a week to track hiring trends. The agent structures everything into a spreadsheet and files it automatically. Used to take a junior analyst two hours.
Where Web Scraping fits
Web Scraping is part of Things they can do out of the box.
Every AI employee ships with built-in abilities that work out of the box. Search the live web for real-time information, scrape and crawl any website for structured data, and generate images directly in conversation. No plugins to install, no APIs to configure.
- Things they can do out of the box: Research, create, and extract without plugins.
Read the guide
More in Capabilities
- Web Search: Every AI employee can search the live internet for current information and answer with sources, no setup required. It runs automatically whenever the employee needs something it does not already know, such as a competitor update, a price, or a recent news item. Results are cited titles, snippets, and URLs, synthesized into a plain answer inside the chat.
- Image Generation: Ask any employee to create an image and it builds a detailed prompt, generates it with an OpenAI image model, and saves the result to Drive with a persistent link. Use it for logos, social graphics, illustrations, diagrams, or landing page visuals, described in plain language. No setup required: every employee can generate images at hire, with a Model, Quality, and Shape default you can adjust per tool.
- Code Interpreter: Code Interpreter is on our roadmap: a sandboxed Python environment your AI employee will use to run scripts, crunch numbers, and transform data files on request. Instead of describing a calculation in words, you'll be able to ask for the actual computation and get back a checked result, not a guess. It is not available yet.
- Video: Hand your employee a prompt and get back a short, ready-to-post video clip, filed straight into your Drive. Built for social cuts, ad concepts, and quick product demos. Editing your own footage is coming next.
- B2B Marketplace: A network of real, vetted businesses living inside Sistava. Ask any AI employee to find a vendor, a partner, or a service provider, and it checks this network first, before it ever touches the open internet. Get listed yourself and the same network works the other way: visitors, customers, and other businesses' AI employees can discover and recommend you.
- Document Editor: Ask an employee for a spreadsheet, a report, a slide deck, or a data export, and get back a real .xlsx, .docx, .pptx, .csv, or .pdf file, not a wall of text pasted into chat. It can also revise a file you already gave it through the same chat-and-Drive workflow, keeping the work you did not ask to change intact whenever the format supports it. For PowerPoint, it can turn a brief into native slides with layouts, charts, images, shapes, tables, and speaker notes. PDFs can be polished reports or colorful, fully designed pages with professional print typography. Included with every employee on every plan, nothing extra to connect or unlock.
- Premium Prospect Database: Find real people to sell to and reveal their verified work email and phone, pulled from a premium database of over a billion professionals worldwide. Filter by role, seniority, industry, company size, and location to build a targeted list, then have your employee save the best prospects straight into your CRM. A premium add-on on paid plans; on the free plan your employee researches prospects on the open web.
- Send an Employee to Your Meeting: Share a Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams link and your employee joins the call as a named participant. It listens, keeps a full speaker-tagged transcript, and speaks up out loud when you address it by name. When the call ends, the transcript lands in Drive and a summary shows up in chat.
- Get a Live Meeting Transcript: Your AI employee joins a Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams call and captures a full transcript as people speak, tagged by speaker and timestamped. Ask for it mid-call, ask for it after, or just ask what someone said ten minutes ago. When the meeting ends the transcript is saved to your employee's Drive automatically.
- Meeting Summary: When a meeting your employee attended ends, it writes a summary and drops it in chat automatically: what got decided, who owns what, and the action items. No need to ask for a recap, it is already waiting when you check in.
- Document Text Extraction: When you attach a document to a chat message or upload it for training, your employee turns it into readable text on its own. PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, OpenDocument files, RTF, and plain text or data files all come through automatically, tables included, with no conversion step for you to run first.
- Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL: Paste a link to a GitHub repository or a URL that hosts an Anthropic-style Skill package, and your employee will import the whole thing directly instead of you rebuilding it by hand in the Create Skill drawer. This is on our roadmap and is not active yet: the option appears in the Skills toolbar and in the Create Skill drawer today, but importing does not run until we ship it.