What is Diffbot?
Diffbot is a web data extraction company that uses computer vision and machine learning to pull structured data from web pages without hand-written scraping rules. Its product line includes Extract, for pulling article, product and discussion fields; Crawl, for site-wide crawling into structured databases; and a Natural Language API for entity, relationship and sentiment extraction. It also maintains a Knowledge Graph built from continuous web crawling, covering more than 246 million organizations, 1.6 billion news articles and 3 million retail products.
Our verdict
Diffbot suits teams that want ready-made structured data, through Extract, Crawl or the Knowledge Graph, rather than building and maintaining their own scrapers. The free tier gives developers full API access to test before paying. It is a closed, hosted service with no self-hosted option, so teams that need to run extraction inside their own infrastructure will need a different tool.
Categories:
AI extraction tools sit between a raw page and your database: you describe the fields you want, and a model returns structured JSON or LLM-ready markdown without hand-written selectors. They hold up well when page layouts change often, at the cost of per-request model spend and the occasional wrong field.
