Web Scraping for AI TrainingWeb Scraping for AI Training › Common Crawl vs scraping
Common Crawl vs web scraping: side by side
The short answer: Use Common Crawl for broad, general web text at huge scale for free. Scrape your own sources when you need specific sites, fresh data, structured fields such as prices and specs, or control over what you collect. Many teams start from Common Crawl and add their own scraped data for the domain that matters.
Updated 10 November 2026 by the ScrapeWise team.
For general language data
Common Crawl
Free and huge.
For domain-specific data
Your own scraping
Chosen sites and fields.
For structured product data
ScrapeWise (our product)
No code, pay per page.
| Common Crawl | Your own scraping | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of data | Free | Pay per page or for infrastructure |
| Cost of processing | High: huge raw archives | Lower: only what you need |
| Coverage | Billions of pages, general web | Exactly the sites you choose |
| Freshness | Monthly snapshots | As fresh as your schedule |
| Structure | Raw HTML and text | Structured fields if you extract them |
| Control | None over what's crawled | Full |
| Best for | Pre-training, general language data | Fine-tuning, domain data, RAG |
Using both
- Start broad
- Filter Common Crawl for your language and topic.
- Add depth
- Scrape the specific sites that define your domain.
- Keep provenance
- Record which records came from where.
Frequently asked questions
Is Common Crawl free?
Yes. The data is free to download from AWS; the cost is the storage and compute to process it.
Is Common Crawl good enough for training?
For general language data, often yes after filtering. For specific domains, fresh data or structured fields, teams add their own scraping.
How often is Common Crawl updated?
A new crawl is released roughly every month.
Can I find a specific page in Common Crawl?
Yes, using its free index, but only if the page happened to be crawled.