Data agents

What is a data agent

A data agent is an AI-powered program that visits websites, understands their content, and extracts specific data points into structured formats. Unlike traditional web scrapers that rely on CSS selectors and fixed page structures, data agents understand content semantically — they can interpret layouts, navigate dynamic sites, and adapt when pages change.

How they differ from scrapers

Traditional web scraping is brittle. A scraper is a set of rules: "find the element with class price-tag, extract the text, parse it as a number." When the website changes its class names, redesigns its layout, or adds new elements, the scraper breaks.

Data agents work differently:

• Semantic understanding — agents interpret what content means, not just where it sits in the DOM. They can identify a price, a product name, or a rating regardless of how the page is structured.
• Navigation capability — agents can click through pages, scroll to load content, handle cookie consent dialogs, and navigate multi-step flows.
• Adaptation — when a site redesigns, agents continue working because they understand the content, not just the structure. No code changes needed.
• Dynamic content — agents handle JavaScript-rendered pages, lazy-loaded content, infinite scroll, and single-page applications.

Two types of agent

Jsonify deploys two types of data agent, corresponding to its two products:

Read agents (used by Radar) visit pages and extract visible content. They handle the complexity of modern web pages — JavaScript rendering, dynamic layouts, pop-ups — but their job is observation. They read what's on the page and extract it into structured fields.

Interactive agents (used by Benchmark) go further. They fill out forms, select dropdown options, click buttons, and navigate multi-step journeys. This allows extraction of data that only appears after user interaction, like insurance quotes or configured product pricing.

What agents extract

Agents extract data into fields you define. Common field types include:

• Text — product names, descriptions, feature lists, review content
• Numbers — prices, ratings, stock counts, dimensions
• Dates — publication dates, promotion end dates, last-updated timestamps
• Lists — product variants, available colors, included features
• URLs — product images, source links, related pages

Fields are fully customizable per deployment. You tell Jsonify what data points matter for your use case, and agents are configured to extract exactly those fields.

Reliability and scale

Data agents run on Jsonify's distributed infrastructure:

• Multiple browser environments for rendering JavaScript-heavy sites
• Proxy networks (residential and datacenter) for consistent access
• Automatic retries with fallback strategies when pages fail to load
• Parallel execution for monitoring thousands of pages simultaneously
• Quality validation to catch extraction errors before delivery

No maintenance required

Because data agents understand content semantically, they don't break when sites change. Jsonify's team monitors agent performance and handles any adjustments needed — you don't need engineers maintaining scraping code.