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

Five leading data-scraping companies—Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain—have formally united under a single umbrella called Source, driven by a skyrocketing demand attributed to AI agents. The Vilnius-based group reports a fourfold increase in service demand within a year, alongside a processing capacity of 1.5 million requests per second. Source aims to provide unified legal and operational support while allowing each brand to maintain its distinct strategies and customer bases. This consolidation is crucial for the AI/ML community as it signals the growing reliance on live data for AI applications, particularly next-generation search tools that pull information from the web. Source seeks to position itself as a central player in negotiating access to public web data, amidst ongoing legal challenges in the data-scraping space. With brands under Source already recognized as top competitors, the implications for pricing and competition dynamics within the industry are significant as they navigate new regulatory landscapes while striving to expand their AI-focused services.