AI giants targeted by scraping bots — ChatGPT and Perplexity enter the most-scraped websites list for the first time
Decodo research reveals that AI platforms ChatGPT and Perplexity have entered the top five most-scraped websites for the first time. This shift indicates that businesses are now scraping AI tools to monitor how they present information and rank products, rather than just tracking consumer search trends. The data also highlights a broader move away from traditional retail sites like Walmart and eBay toward social media and AI-driven discovery channels.
- ▪ChatGPT ranked third in the most-scraped websites list, accounting for 14% of observed scraping activity.
- ▪Perplexity secured the fifth position with 10% of the data, while TikTok led the list with 18%.
- ▪Decodo CEO Vaidotas Juknys noted that the use case for data collection has changed from monitoring searches to monitoring AI-generated answers.
- ▪Traditional retail giants such as Walmart, eBay, and Airbnb dropped out of the top ten most-scraped sites.
- ▪Seven of the top ten sites in the current report are new entrants compared to previous years.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/pro/ai-giants-targeted-by-scraping-bots-chatgpt-and-perplexity-enter-the-most-scraped-websites-list-for-the-first-time |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:20:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T12:28:23.882Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T12:28:23.882Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 5yriMZiVVggu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Pro Security AI giants targeted by scraping bots — ChatGPT and Perplexity enter the most-scraped websites list for the first time News By Craig Hale Published 5 October 2026 Businesses are checking how they appear in AI When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Shutterstock) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Businesses are tracking AI as consumers shift to AI-powered buying patternsSocial media is also a big are for monitoring consumer trendsConventional retail like Walmart and eBay have droppedAI platforms have become synonymous with scraping other…
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