How to Add AI-Powered Web Search and Data Extraction to Your App

Your app needs data from the web. Maybe your AI agent needs to research a topic before answering. Maybe you're building a competitive analysis tool. Maybe your users need real-time information that isn't in your database.

Building web search and extraction from scratch means maintaining a search index, running headless browsers, handling anti-bot measures, and parsing thousands of different HTML structures. It's a 3-6 month engineering project.

Or you use managed APIs that handle all of it.

Three Capabilities, One API

1. Web Search - find relevant pages

Send a search query, get ranked results with AI-generated summaries. Like Google's API, but with built-in AI processing.

Send a query like "best practices for microservice authentication" and receive:

• Ranked web results with titles, URLs, and snippets
• AI-generated summary of the key findings
• Source attribution for every claim

Use it for:

• AI agent research - agent searches the web before responding to users
• Content enrichment - augment your database with web data
• Competitive monitoring - track mentions, pricing, and features
• Question answering - find answers to user questions in real-time

2. Content Extraction - get structured data from any page

Point it at a URL, get clean structured data back. No HTML parsing, no dealing with JavaScript-rendered content, no fighting anti-bot measures.

Send a URL and receive:

• Clean text content (no ads, no navigation, no boilerplate)
• Structured data (tables, lists, key-value pairs)
• Metadata (title, author, publication date)
• Configurable summary quality (low, medium, intelligent)

Use it for:

• Product data - extract prices, specs, and reviews from product pages
• Article content - get clean text from news articles and blog posts
• Profile data - extract structured information from company pages
• API alternatives - when a site doesn't have an API, extract the data directly

3. Web Crawling - follow links and extract at scale

Start from a URL and crawl connected pages. Get structured data from an entire site or section.

Configure:

• Crawl depth - how many links deep to follow
• Crawl mode - deep (follow all links), shallow (current page only), or focused (specific sections)
• Domain filtering - include or exclude specific domains
• Rate limiting - control request frequency
• Real-time streaming - results streamed via SSE as pages are processed

Use it for:

• Documentation ingestion - crawl a docs site and extract all content for your knowledge base
• Market research - crawl competitor websites to track products and pricing
• Dataset building - collect training data from public web pages
• Site monitoring - periodically crawl and detect content changes

Real-World Architecture: AI Agent with Web Access

The most powerful pattern: give your AI agent web search as a tool.

User asks a question
    │
    ▼
AI Agent decides it needs current data
    │
    ▼
Search API: finds relevant pages
    │
    ▼
Extract API: pulls structured data from top results
    │
    ▼
Agent synthesizes and responds with real-time information

The agent decides when to search, what to extract, and how to synthesize the information. Your users get answers with real-time data, not stale training knowledge.

Building a Research Pipeline

For deeper research tasks, chain the APIs:

Step 1: Broad search

Query: "microVM security certifications 2026" → Get 20 relevant URLs

Step 2: Selective extraction

Pick the 5 most relevant URLs → extract structured content from each

Step 3: AI synthesis

Feed all extracted content to your AI model → get a comprehensive research report with citations

This gives your users research-grade answers with full source attribution - in seconds, not hours.

Comparison: Build vs Buy

The managed API handles the hard parts - running browsers at scale, rotating proxies, parsing arbitrary HTML, and processing with AI.

Use Cases by Product Type

AI assistants

Give your chatbot access to current information. Instead of "my training data is from 2024," your assistant searches the web and answers with today's data.

Market intelligence tools

Monitor competitors, extract pricing changes, track feature launches. Run automated crawls daily and alert users to changes.

Content aggregators

Pull content from multiple sources, extract the relevant information, and present it in a unified format. News aggregators, deal finders, job boards.

Knowledge base builders

Crawl your company's documentation sites, extract structured content, and build a searchable knowledge base. Keep it fresh with periodic re-crawls.

SEO tools

Search for keywords, extract competitor page content, analyze structure and backlinks. Give users competitive analysis without external API costs.

Research agents

Academic or business research agents that search for papers, extract findings, and synthesize reports. Automate research that takes humans hours.

Browser API for Complex Interactions

For sites that require JavaScript rendering, authentication, or complex interaction patterns, use the Browser API:

• Full browser automation - interact with JavaScript-heavy sites
• Proxy-backed requests - residential proxies for sites that block datacenter IPs
• Session management - maintain cookies and authentication state
• Screenshot capture - visual verification of what the browser sees
• Custom scripts - run JavaScript on the page before extraction

Summary

Add web intelligence to your product:

1. Search - find relevant pages with AI-ranked results and summaries
2. Extract - get clean structured data from any webpage
3. Crawl - follow links and extract from entire sites
4. Browser API - handle JavaScript-heavy and authenticated sites

Don't build a search infrastructure. Don't maintain a headless browser farm. Don't fight anti-bot measures. Use managed APIs and focus on what makes your product unique.

Related reading → How to Build an AI Coding Assistant | Oblien Documentation