Better Fetch

Blog

Notes from building Better Fetch.

· Paul Crossland

Make Fetch Pipelines Policy-Aware

AI crawl controls are turning robots.txt into runtime policy. Treat 402, 403, robots, and crawler identity as first-class fetch signals.

· Paul Crossland

Discover APIs Before Scraping HTML

Modern pages often expose cleaner JSON behind the UI. Capture network calls first, then scrape rendered HTML only when you must.

· Better Fetch

Better Fetch vs. the alternatives — choosing a fetch API in 2026

An honest comparison of Better Fetch against Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, Bright Data, and the AI-agent fetch tools — and when you shouldn't pick us.