nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

IB

24 alternatives to I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

Hey HN -- I'm a solo dev. Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing. The core trick: shuffle characters and words in your HTML using a seed, then use CSS (flexbox order, direction: rtl, unicode-bidi) to put them back visually. Browser renders perfectly. textContent returns garbage. On top of that: email/phone RTL obfuscation with decoy characters, AI honeypots that inject prompt instructions into LLM scrapers, clipboard interception, canvas-based image rendering (no img src in DOM), robots.txt blocking 30+ AI crawlers, and…

This SDK scrambles HTML content to prevent AI crawlers from reading website text while keeping pages visually normal for human users. It uses CSS techniques like flexbox and text direction to render content correctly… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill). There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win. But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.

    Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headf

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    SCRAPR▲260

    The data layer for the agentic web

    Mar 2026 · scraprbeta.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN, This is Jan, founder of Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. Drawing on our team's years of experience, today we're launching Crawlee [1], the web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js that's designed for the fastest development and maximum reliability in production. For details, see the short video [2] or read the announcement blog post [3]. Main features: - Supports headless browsers with Playwright or Puppeteer - Supports raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM - Automated parallelization and scaling of crawlers for best performance - Avoids blocking using…

    2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Crawly▲606

    Never write another web scraper

    2016 · crawly.diffbot.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    The right robots.txt file for your project

    2024 · generaterobotstxt.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

    2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Diffbot▲272

    Extract content from articles, products, videos and more

    2015 · diffbot.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    undash▲298

    Makes AI text feel more human by removing em—dashes

    2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Crawlee▲229

    Build reliable web scrapers and robots, fast!

    2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    Hi! I'm Marcell, and I'm working on FetchFox (https://fetchfoxai.com). It's a Chrome extension that lets you use AI to scrape any website for any data. I'd love to get your feedback. Here's a quick demo showing how you can use it to scrape leads from an auto dealer directory. What's cool is that it scrapes non-uniform pages, which is quite hard to do with "traditional" scrapers: https://youtu.be/wPbyPSFsqzA A little background: I've written lots and lots of scrapers over the last 10+ years. They're fun to write when they work, but the internet has changed in ways…

    2024 · fetchfoxai.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    scrape-it▲186

    A Node.js scraper for humans.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers. LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that: - Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Turn any webpage into structured data using LLMs. Contribute to mishushakov/llm-scraper development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Scrape, Screenshot, and extract LLM-ready data

    Jan 2026 · geekflare.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Monitor webpages to track website & page changes. Get email alerts, push notifications and slack/discord alerts on changes. Start free monitoring today | Distill

    2022 · scrapex.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    An experimental AntiBot, AntiCrawl reverse proxy for serving simple static content. - pulkitsharma07/OnlyHumans-Proxy

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    We've been trying to evaluate web scraping companies, but when you look at their benchmarks, you can't verify anything, and they mostly exist to prove the company is successful. They put somewhere between 98% and 100% because they pick their own urls, define success their own way, and don't publish the harness. We also saw companies like scrapfly astroturf websites like scrapeway and call them independent. So, we built an open source benchmark that we want to represent the frontier of web data. We're trying to look across all major anti-bot providers and industries, to build a comprehensive…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN, As the title says, I built this because AI-generated web automation scripts are often full of hallucinated CSS selectors. They’re simply guessing because they can't see the actual page. My tool, Slash, fixes this by giving the agent a real browser. It sees the page: Before writing any code, it loads the site and analyzes the live DOM. This leads to much more reliable Playwright scripts. You get the code: It outputs the full script, not just a data file. This means no black boxes. You can run it, put it in a cron job, and modify it however you want. The goal is to get the benefits of…

    2025 · slash.cool · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    With AI, it's faster than ever to ship a marketing site... but most of what gets generated is slop that was never built to be found. Plus the tools meant to catch that fall short: most SEO auditors cost money, don't play nicely with your agents, or tell you what's wrong without telling you how to actually rank for SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization: being cited by AI search like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews). crawlie fixes that! It's 100% free, it's local-first, it's agent-native (MCP baked in!), and every issue it finds comes with why it matters and how to fix it.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    The goal was to bring down the cost at the context eng. level. We do it with Layout Memoization. Instead of dumping HTML into the context window, we have built a continual learning browser harness (read only for now). We have built an early prototype for you to try out, where you can: 1. Spins up a browser instance 2. Extract any structured or tabular data from anywhere on the open-web 3. And you can do all this at the cost of a vector search Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

    Aug 2026 · makralabs.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi HN, I built CountermarkAI, a lightweight anti-scraping & bot-detection tool for content creators and website owners. It’s designed to help protect your work from unauthorized scraping and AI training, that repurposed your work without permission. How It Works: Use Hashtag – Creators add a unique hashtag to their content as a declaration of ownership. Protect Website – For those running your own sites, simply add a small snippet to your . The protect.js script works asynchronously by sending metadata from every page load back to our servers, logging requests, and flagging known AI-training…

    2025 · countermarkai.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →