Content
Website Parsing: What It Is, How It Works, and Why You Need Data Parsing
April 7, 2025
8 mins
Modern business cannot be imagined without data, but collecting the necessary information, from competitors' prices to customer reviews, is very time-consuming. This is where parsing comes in - automated collection of necessary information from the Internet.
In this article, we will tell you what website parsing is, what types of it exist, how it works, and where it is used. We will also consider legal aspects and ways to protect your website from unwanted parsing.
Parsing is an automated process of collecting and processing information from web pages. The parser extracts the information you need from competitors' websites and structures it into an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. This way, you can see the changes you need, react quickly, and update your promotion strategy.
In simple words, parsing a website means instructing a special program (parser) to quickly “read” the website content and extract the necessary data from it in a format that is convenient for you.
Data parsing is a tool that allows you to get quick access to a large amount of information. This data will be useful for competition, marketing, and promotion. Parsing websites significantly saves time on market research, for example, price offers from competitors.
Here's how you can apply parsing:
1. Competitive analysis. Parsing allows you to get detailed information about your competitors, including their product range, promotional offers, website sections, content types, etc. This will allow you to understand their strengths and weaknesses, track changes in strategy, and build a more effective marketing or business strategy of your own.
2. Price monitoring. With the help of parsing, you can regularly and automatically monitor the prices of goods or services on dozens of competitors' websites at the same time. You will always have up-to-date price data, be able to quickly respond to market changes, and promptly adjust your pricing policy to stay competitive.
3. SEO analytics. Parsing is also widely used to improve your position in search engines. For example, you can automatically collect information from competing websites: keywords, meta tags, headlines, and the structure of their content. This will allow you to identify successful strategies of your competitors and optimize your own web pages to rank higher in search results.
Website parsing allows you to quickly obtain large amounts of information, minimizes human errors, and regularly updates data (for example, for price monitoring or competitor analysis). This ensures the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of information collection.
For example, a cosmetics store regularly launches promotions and sales based on parsing competitors' prices. Thanks to the daily automatic collection of information, the store's marketers can quickly respond to any price cuts by competitors and quickly launch similar promotional offers to avoid losing market share.
It is important to keep in mind that parsing depends on the stability of the site structure - changing the layout may require frequent updates of the settings. Besides, websites often use protection against automatic data collection (captcha, IP blocking), which complicates the process.
Data parsing also means collecting information about errors on your website: both technical or content-related.
Yulia Stolar
SEO Specialist
There are different types and approaches to website parsing. Methods may differ in how data is obtained from the resource. Let us consider the main ones:
The process of parsing data from a website begins when a special program sends an HTTP request to a web resource, receives HTML code or structured data (for example, JSON via API) in response, and then analyzes this content to extract the necessary information.
In order for the parser to find the necessary elements (for example, prices, product names, descriptions), you need to set specific rules first. These rules are usually defined using CSS selectors or XPath paths that tell the parser exactly what to look for on the page. For example:
Parsing can be implemented both with the help of simple ready-made tools for independent use and with the involvement of specialists to implement complex technical solutions.
If you don't have programming skills but want to try to collect information yourself, there are simple online platforms that don't require writing code:
These tools are simple, but they have limitations in terms of customization flexibility and data volumes.
If you need large-scale, stable, or complex parsing with a large number of pages or specific logic (for example, parsing dynamic websites or complex multi-level directories), it is better to contact specialists in this niche.
Among the tools that can be used for such parsing:
If you need to get simple data quickly and independently (for example, prices or a list of products from one or two websites), online tools are enough. However, if you need to regularly monitor a large amount of information from many sites with a complex structure or security, you should hire specialists who can implement complex parsing scenarios, take into account the technical features of the sites, and take care of the stability of the parser.
While there isn't a singular international law addressing parsing, several international agreements and principles influence its legality:
Different regions and countries have specific laws that can affect the legality of parsing:
When engaging in parsing or web scraping, it's essential to consider:
Parsing is considered legal if you collect public data, such as prices, product specifications, or public contact information that is available to all site visitors.
Important: Many websites explicitly prohibit automated information collection in their Terms of Service. Violation of these terms may result in both technical measures (e.g., blocking an IP address) and legal consequences, including claims of copyright infringement or unfair competition.
To avoid risks, you should always check the information use policy of the website from which you collect data in advance, and if in doubt, obtain legal advice.
Protecting your website from unwanted parsing requires a comprehensive approach that combines technical solutions and legal measures.
Some of the methods, such as the use of CAPTCHAs, can cause inconvenience to users, which negatively affects the interaction with the site. Therefore, when using such methods, you should ensure that they are minimized for real users to avoid UX problems.
Yulia Stolar
SEO Specialist
Of course, none of the protection methods provides an absolute guarantee. A smart bot will be able to bypass some of the protections. However, combining several levels of protection will make parsing data from your website much more difficult. At the same time, it's important to find a balance: protect your content without creating unnecessary inconvenience for real visitors.
When protecting your website from crawling, it is important not to negatively affect its visibility in search engines. Some protection methods can prevent search engines from indexing your site, which can affect your SEO rankings. It is recommended that you thoroughly test the implemented measures and monitor changes in the site's positions.
On January 1, 2023, amendments to the Law of Ukraine “On Copyright and Related Rights” came into force in Ukraine, which provide new opportunities to protect databases from unauthorized collection or reuse of their content, which is of great importance in the fight against parsing.
Thanks to the new rules, databases (which can include online stores, price monitoring platforms or customer databases) have legal protection regardless of how original their content is.
The main point of this change is that now database copyright holders can protect their resources from parsing, unauthorized extraction or reuse of a significant part of their content.
For example, this may apply to the following cases:
Therefore, businesses that want to protect their website from parsing should clearly state the terms of use on the website. In particular, it should include a ban on automatic data collection.
Website parsing is a powerful tool for automating data collection, which, when used correctly, helps businesses save time and obtain valuable information for decision-making. As practice shows, the possibilities of parsing are significant - from price monitoring to in-depth market analysis - and this approach has already become an integral part of modern marketing.
If you want to get the most out of this tool but don't have the time or expertise to do it yourself, it's better to entrust website parsing to Promodo specialists. Our team has the necessary experience and tools to implement parsing for your tasks: from setting up scripts to processing the results.
You may also like
Choose quality and trusted services to improve the presence of your company on the Internet, and feel free to contact our UK team if you have any questions.
The modern travel industry is extremely competitive, so without a thorough strategy you may fall behind the competition.
Censydiam wheel helps businesses find unmet emotional needs of consumers while analyzing the niche and competitors.
Together with Kate Guzevataya, Head of Web Analytics at Promodo we have explored the topic in full and share our findings with you.
We at Promodo are ready to help you improve your performance across all digital marketing channels.
Get started
.avif)
.avif)
.svg){kind=logo}
