Source brings five web-scraping brands under one AI-focused umbrella

Source has brought five web-data businesses under one corporate umbrella, arguing that the rapid rise of AI agents has changed the scale and importance of live web access.¹²

The new group brings together Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Honeygain under the Source name. The businesses will keep their own teams, products, customers and market positions, while Source handles shared functions including patents, procurement, hiring and compliance.¹²

What Source is changing

Source says demand across the organisations has grown fourfold in a year as AI agents, search tools and other AI products increasingly pull live information from the web.¹ The group says its systems now process 1.5 million requests per second and that it is expanding web-search APIs designed for AI agents.

The announcement is less a single product launch than a formal declaration that several already-connected businesses now share common oversight. Oxylabs acquired Webshare in 2022 and ScrapingBee in 2025, while Honeygain became a major residential proxy-sourcing partner in 2021, according to TechRadar.¹ Decodo's relationship with the wider group was less explicit until this announcement, although Proxyway also reported the companies' closer connection.³

The five brands are aimed at different customers. Oxylabs focuses on enterprises and AI labs, Decodo targets the mid-market, ScrapingBee sells developer-facing APIs, Webshare serves professional consumers and independent builders, and Honeygain pays people for access to spare bandwidth.¹² Source says those brands will remain independent in their strategies and customer relationships rather than becoming one undifferentiated service.

Why AI agents matter

AI assistants need more than a static training set when they are asked about current prices, breaking news, company pages or rapidly changing technical information. They need a way to discover, retrieve and process live web data. That demand is creating a new market for the infrastructure between an AI agent and the sites it wants to read.

Source's own launch material frames the company as a web-access layer for that market. Its argument is that negotiating access one website or licensing deal at a time could leave real-time information available only to the largest AI companies. A larger group of proxy, scraping and search businesses can negotiate from a stronger position, although that same concentration raises questions about who controls access and on what terms.

There is also a practical reason to watch the structure. TechRadar notes that three of its nine recommended proxy providers — Decodo, Oxylabs and Webshare — now sit within Source.¹ They may continue to compete on price and features, but common ownership makes the relationship relevant to anyone comparing those services.

The questions for customers

Source says it has no customers or products of its own, presenting itself instead as the organisation supporting the five individual brands. That arrangement should make the immediate changes easier to miss: the names customers already know are not disappearing, and their product pages can continue to operate separately.

The important questions are whether the brands remain transparent about their shared ownership, whether competition between them remains meaningful, and how Source's planned AI-search products differ from the web APIs Oxylabs already offers. A new umbrella does not automatically mean a new technical capability; in this case, some of the promised AI-agent infrastructure extends work that already exists.

The group's timing also matters because web scraping is facing growing legal and policy scrutiny. TechRadar reports that Oxylabs is among the defendants in a Reddit lawsuit alleging large-scale scraping activity, claims Oxylabs has said it will defend.¹ That context makes Source's reference to responsible access more than a branding exercise: the group will need to explain how its infrastructure respects site rules, licensing arrangements and the rights of publishers and users.

Our opinion

Source's formation is worth watching because it turns a loose collection of familiar proxy and scraping brands into a more visible piece of the AI supply chain. The fourfold demand claim comes from the company itself, so it should be treated as a statement of strategy rather than an independently verified market measurement. Even so, the underlying direction is clear: AI products need fresher information, and the businesses that fetch that information are becoming strategically important.

The strongest part of the announcement is its clarity about the market. Source is not pretending that five brands have suddenly become one consumer product. It is formalising shared infrastructure and presenting that scale as a response to AI agents. The risk is that customers gain convenience while the web gets another powerful intermediary with an unusually large role in deciding how access is negotiated. Source's next test is therefore not just whether its APIs work, but whether it can make that access model transparent and accountable.¹²³