Using Zyte MCP to Investigate Sites Before Building Web Scrapers

The author argues that much of web scraping work is planning, such as finding where data lives and which requests return it without waste. They use Zyte MCP to give an AI agent access to Zyte's fetching, browser rendering, and extraction tools, letting it inspect sites that block basic requests or rely on JavaScript. The agent evaluates options like rendered pages, embedded HTML, underlying APIs, sitemaps, and category pages, and can check domain support and the cost difference between HTTP and browser requests. A key lesson is that cheaper routes must still supply every required field, as one example API omitted UPC, weight, and dimension data present on the rendered page. The author also recommends building a reusable crawl strategy skill that records each useful check for future investigations.