About
Diffbot is an AI-powered web data platform that transforms unstructured web content into clean, structured, queryable data. Using a combination of computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning, Diffbot can automatically extract and categorize information from virtually any public website — no scraping rules or custom parsers required. At the core of Diffbot's platform is its Knowledge Graph, the world's largest automatically constructed knowledge base, containing over 246 million organizations, 1.6 billion news articles and blog posts, millions of retail products, discussion threads, and events. The Knowledge Graph supports both search and entity enrichment, allowing businesses to find new companies and people or enhance their existing datasets with fresh, accurate data. Diffbot's product suite includes the Extract API for on-demand article, product, and discussion extraction; a Crawl service for turning entire websites into structured databases; a Natural Language API for entity and sentiment analysis on raw text; and LeadGraph for sales intelligence and lead generation. Diffbot serves over 400 companies across finance, e-commerce, market intelligence, and media monitoring use cases. A free tier is available with full API access and no credit card required, making it accessible for developers, researchers, and startups looking to prototype data-driven applications.
Key Features
- Knowledge Graph: Access the world's largest automatically constructed knowledge base with 246M+ organizations, 1.6B+ articles, millions of retail products, discussions, and events — all searchable and enrichable via API.
- Automatic Web Extraction: Extract structured data from articles, products, discussions, and more from any URL without writing custom parsing rules, powered by AI and computer vision.
- Intelligent Web Crawling: Turn entire websites into structured databases of products, articles, or discussions in minutes using Diffbot's autonomous crawler.
- Natural Language API: Analyze raw text to extract entities, relationships, and topic-level sentiment — ideal for enriching documents or powering NLP pipelines.
- Entity Enrichment (LeadGraph): Enrich existing datasets of companies and people with up-to-date firmographic data including revenue, locations, categories, and investment information.
Use Cases
- Building market intelligence dashboards by continuously extracting and monitoring competitor and industry news
- Enriching CRM or sales databases with up-to-date firmographic data on companies and decision-makers
- Powering RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) AI applications with structured, real-time web knowledge
- Aggregating product data and pricing information from multiple e-commerce sites for comparison or analysis
- Extracting and structuring news articles and discussion threads for sentiment analysis and trend monitoring
Pros
- No Rules or Templates Needed: AI-driven extraction works on any public website without the maintenance burden of site-specific scraping rules or CSS selectors.
- Massive Pre-Built Knowledge Graph: Instant access to hundreds of millions of pre-crawled, structured records covering organizations, news, products, and more — no need to build from scratch.
- Free Tier Available: Full API access is available for free with no credit card required, lowering the barrier for developers and researchers to get started.
Cons
- Cost at Scale: High-volume extraction and Knowledge Graph queries can become expensive; enterprise-grade usage requires a paid plan that may not suit small teams.
- Limited to Public Web Data: Diffbot can only extract from publicly accessible web pages and cannot access paywalled, login-protected, or private content.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Diffbot used for?
Diffbot is used to automatically extract and structure data from websites, enrich business databases with web-sourced information, monitor news and web content at scale, and power AI applications with structured knowledge graph data.
Does Diffbot require coding or scraping rules?
No. Diffbot's AI automatically identifies and extracts relevant data from any webpage without requiring custom rules, templates, or coding. Simply pass a URL to the API and receive structured JSON data.
What data types does Diffbot's Knowledge Graph contain?
The Knowledge Graph includes organizations (246M+), news articles and blog posts (1.6B+), retail products (3M+), discussion threads, events, and people data — all automatically extracted and interlinked.
Is there a free plan?
Yes. Diffbot offers a free tier with full API access and no credit card required, suitable for developers and small-scale projects. Higher usage tiers are available on paid plans.
Can Diffbot be used to build RAG pipelines or AI applications?
Yes. Diffbot is widely used as a data layer for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, market intelligence tools, and AI applications that need structured, up-to-date web data as context.
