Five of the web's biggest data-scraping brands now sit under one $3.6 billion umbrella, and AI agents are the reason why

Date:
Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:20:00 +0000

Description:
Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain are now one $3.6
billion family called Source, and it says AI agents have quadrupled demand.

FULL STORY ======================================================================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 Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain now formally sit under one Vilnius-based umbrella called Source Source claims AI agents drove a fourfold increase in demand for services across its organizations The brands, previously reviewed as rivals, including three of TechRadar's nine best-proxy picks, now officially share common oversight Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain have formally come together under a single name, Source, and the Lithuanian group behind them says AI agents are why it needed one.

The Vilnius-based ecosystem claims demand across its companies has risen fourfold in a year as AI agents, next-generation search tools, and frontier
AI products pull live data from the web. Its systems now process 1.5 million requests per second, and that it is expanding into web search APIs built specifically for AI agents. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: One umbrella with five different, competing shopfronts? Source presents itself as a backbone rather than a business. Its launch post says it has no customers or products of its own; instead, it handles patents, procurement, hiring, and compliance, while each brand keeps its own team, product
strategy, and customer base.

The brands are split by customer type. Oxylabs serves enterprises and AI
labs; Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) targets the mid-market; ScrapingBee sells developer APIs; Webshare serves professional consumers and solo builders; and Honeygain pays ordinary people for their spare bandwidth. You may like
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For anyone shopping for a proxy service, this is the most practical takeaway. Oxylabs bought Webshare in 2022 and ScrapingBee in 2025, and Honeygain became its main residential proxy sourcing partner in 2021.

Decodo's ties were less clear-cut until now, and trade site Proxyway notes that the launch officially links Oxylabs and Decodo under one organization. Source CEO Vytautas Savickas ran Decodo until March 2026, when he moved
across to lead the Oxylabs group and founder Julius erniauskas became chairman. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

All of this points to a marriage of convenience rather than a merger by organizations that are already very closely interlinked. This is interesting because some of these brands have been sold and reviewed as alternatives to one another.

The best example of this is that three of the nine picks in TechRadar's own best proxy sites guide now belong to Source: Decodo as best overall, Oxylabs as best for business, and Webshare as best for privacy.

For context on the overlap, our residential proxy roundup described Oxylabs
as one of Decodo's toughest competitors. Source says the companies remain fully independent in strategy, customers, and market presence, and that may well hold commercially, but common oversight is now a matter of record. What to read next AI giants targeted by scraping bots ChatGPT and Perplexity
enter the most-scraped websites list for the first time Bright Data review Webshare review

The release provided to TechRadar says Source gives the group "a unified
voice in defending responsible access to public web data," and its legal history explains the appetite.

Reddit sued Oxylabs alongside Perplexity, SerpApi and AWMProxy in October 2025, alleging they evaded its anti-scraping measures by lifting Reddit content from Google search results. Oxylabs said it was "shocked and disappointed" and would defend itself.

It was still listed as a defendant in filings this spring, and in late July a federal judge allowed Reddit's core claims against SerpApi and Perplexity to proceed . Further back, a Texas jury awarded rival Bright Data nearly $7.5 million against Oxylabs in a 2021 patent case.

Source's own essay on AI agents and the open web argues that if access is negotiated one licensing deal at a time, only the biggest companies will be able to afford it. This makes a convenient argument for a large web scraping group, but the gatekeeping fears are real.

The most concrete product promised here is AI search, and it is older than
the umbrella itself: Oxylabs already offers a Web API that pairs a search endpoint with a scraping endpoint for agents, so the "dedicated AI Search APIs" promised look more like an expansion of existing work than a new
product line.

For customers, the questions to watch are whether the brands keep competing
on price, how clearly each one discloses their newfound relationship, and how the Reddit case plays out for Oxylabs.

For everyone else, Source is a bet that AI agents will keep needing the live web, and that the companies supplying the pipes deserve a seat at the table when the rules for that access get written, aiming to negotiate from a clustered position of strength. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/five-of-the-webs-biggest-data-scraping-brands-no w-sit-under-one-usd3-6-billion-umbrella-and-ai-agents-are-the-reason-why


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