Free Web Scraping Tools and Developer Utilities

Web scraping is not illegal in itself, and collecting publicly available data is generally permitted. How the data is used, whether the terms of service of the site allow automated access, and whether personal data is involved all affect the answer. For a specific project, read the terms and take legal advice.

Read: Is web scraping legal?

ChatGPT can fetch and summarise individual pages when browsing is enabled, but ChatGPT is not a scraper. ChatGPT cannot crawl many pages, get past anti-bot systems or return structured data at scale on a schedule. Those jobs need a dedicated scraping tool or API that fetches, renders and parses pages for you.

Google does not allow automated access to its search results without permission, and it actively blocks scrapers of those results. Google does publish official APIs for some of its data. Its own crawlers, meanwhile, follow the robots.txt rules that other sites set, which is the same courtesy it asks of everyone else.

Free tools that scrape Google search results exist, but they are unreliable because Google blocks automated queries aggressively. Results break without warning when a request is flagged or a CAPTCHA appears. For consistent results, a SERP API with managed proxies is the practical option, since it absorbs the blocking for you.

Every tool on this page is free, with no account, no email address and no trial. Each tool runs from your browser and lists its own limit on its page, such as 500 pages per crawl or 100,000 characters per conversion, so there is nothing hidden in the small print and no paid tier behind it.

Most web scraping projects need four things: a way to find URLs, a way to check crawl permission, a way to test selectors, and a way to extract clean content. A sitemap generator, a robots.txt tester, an XPath or CSS selector tester and a page-to-text converter cover all four jobs between them.

Nothing needs to be installed to use the tools on this page. Every tool runs in the browser you are reading this in, so there is no extension to add, no desktop application to download and no command-line package. A phone browser works too, although the larger results are easier to read on a desktop.

A crawler discovers and follows URLs across a site, while a scraper extracts specific data from pages it already has. Most real projects use both: crawl to find the pages, then scrape to pull the data from each one. The sitemap generator here is a small crawler, and the converters are small scrapers.

Read: Web crawling vs web scraping

Sites block automated traffic with rate limits, browser fingerprinting and CAPTCHA challenges, and a free browser-based tool cannot get past those. A 403 or 429 response usually means the site detected automation. Handling blocks requires rendering the page in a real browser, pacing requests and rotating IP addresses.

Read about 429 Too Many Requests

Start with the robots.txt tester to check whether the site permits crawling, then use the sitemap generator to find the URLs. After that, run one page through the website-to-text converter to see what clean output looks like. That order mirrors how a real scraping project begins, from permission to discovery to extraction.