In addition to posing a critical challenge to company branding, web scraping threatens sales, SEO rankings and can undermine the integrity of content that took resources to produce.
Top Victims
The top web scraping victims by industry in 2015 were real estate, digital publishing, e-commerce, directories and classifieds, and airlines and travel. Many of these industries are being targeted by an influx of startups that are scraping information from industry leaders in order to compete.
Real estate sites are the no. 1 web scraping victims. Real estate had the highest percentage of bad bots at 32 percent. From 2014 to 2015, the real estate industry saw a 300 percent increase in bad bot activity.