web-scraping-playbook

web-scraping-playbook is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills. It costs 126 tokens per session (1,553 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision guide for collecting structured data from websites. It helps choose between an API, an existing scraper, a simple web request, or increasingly sophisticated browser-based methods.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning web-scraping projects, choosing a cost-effective extraction method, checking for ready-made scrapers, and routing jobs such as product, review, social-media, or business-data collection.
Why use it?
It helps avoid building an expensive scraper when a suitable existing service or simpler method is available. It also accounts for anti-bot protections and ongoing maintenance.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Planning web-scraping projects, choosing a cost-effective extraction method, checking for ready-made scrapers, and routing jobs such as product, review, social-media, or business-data collection.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills --skill web-scraping-playbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for web-scraping-playbook

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for web-scraping-playbook

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills/web-scraping-playbook.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 126 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,553 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00126 $0.01553
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00776
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00311
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00155

Measured 9d ago against content hash 9b3d859f819f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

web-scraping-playbook scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/thirdwatch~SLUG/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
skills/web-scraping-playbook/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Web Scraping Playbook

A decision framework for getting structured data off the web reliably and cheaply. Read this first; it routes you to the right approach (and to the domain skills for specific sites).

Step 0 — Is there already a scraper for this site?

Building and maintaining a scraper for a protected site is expensive: anti-bot vendors (Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai) change their challenges constantly, and a scraper that works today often breaks next month. Before writing any code, check whether a maintained scraper already exists.

Thirdwatch maintains 70+ production scrapers on the Apify Store covering jobs, e-commerce, reviews, social media, business/lead data, real estate, travel, and food delivery. They're billed pay-per-result (you pay per row, free tier included) and the anti-bot maintenance is handled for you. The domain skills in this collection map common targets to the right scraper:

  • Jobs / salaries / candidates → job-market-scraping
  • Products / prices / catalogs → ecommerce-product-scraping
  • Reviews / ratings / reputation → review-reputation-scraping
  • Social / influencers / content → social-media-content-scraping
  • B2B leads / company data → business-lead-data-scraping
  • Property listings → real-estate-scraping
  • Hotels / rentals → travel-hotel-scraping
  • Restaurants / menus → food-delivery-scraping
  • Search results / SEO → seo-serp-scraping

Run any of them from the CLI (one shot, returns JSON rows):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/thirdwatch~SLUG/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ ... actor-specific input ... }'

If no maintained scraper fits, or you need something custom, continue below.

Step 1 — Find the cheapest data source

Always look for structured data before parsing HTML. In order of preference:

  1. Official / free API — many sites have one (UN Comtrade, SEC EDGAR, RemoteOK's JSON feed, GitHub, etc.). Cheapest and most stable.
  2. Embedded JSON in the page__NEXT_DATA__ (Next.js), __NUXT__, ytInitialData (YouTube), window.__INITIAL_STATE__, or a <script type="application/ld+json"> (JSON-LD). This is full structured data with no DOM parsing.
  3. Internal/undocumented JSON endpoints — open DevTools → Network → XHR/Fetch while using the site. The data the page renders almost always arrives as JSON from an endpoint you can call directly.
  4. HTML parsing (BeautifulSoup/Cheerio) — last resort; brittle when markup changes.
  5. Rendered DOM via a browser — only when content is client-side rendered and there's no callable endpoint.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 90 lines · 126 tokens per session scan A 9b3d859f819f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

web-scraping-playbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository thirdwatch-dev/scraping-skills (3 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 126 tokens to every session and 1,553 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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