Bright Data

• ▸Proxy infrastructure: residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies across 400M+ IPs
• ▸Web Unlocker API: automatic CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot bypass for scraping any site
• ▸SERP API: structured search-engine results in JSON or HTML
• ▸Browser API (formerly Scraping Browser): remote browsers with built-in proxies and unlocking, compatible with Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium
• ▸Crawl API: crawl whole websites and return content as HTML, CSV or Markdown
• ▸Scraper APIs and Scraper Studio: pre-built scraping endpoints for popular sites, plus AI-built custom scrapers
• ▸Dataset Marketplace: pre-collected, ready-to-download datasets across 250+ domains
• ▸Web Archive: petabyte-scale historical web data
• ▸MCP server for AI agents to access live web data through Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients

Authentication

API key sent as a Bearer token in the "Authorization" header (Authorization: Bearer <token>); keys can be scoped to permission levels (Admin, Finance, Ops, Limit, User) and given expiration dates. Proxy networks, Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser also accept native proxy username/password auth, billed at the same rate

Base URL

https://api.brightdata.com

Rate limits

Varies by product and account. Unfunded (free-tier) accounts are limited to 1,000 requests/minute across SERP API, Web Unlocker API and proxy products, removed once funds are added. Unlimited datacenter/ISP zones use a fair-use allowance of 100GB per proxy IP per month rather than a hard QPS cap.

Notable endpoints

• POST /request - the core proxy/unlocking request endpoint
• SERP API - POST /request and /response for structured search-engine results (separate OpenAPI spec: serp-rest-api.json)
• Browser Sessions API - /browser_sessions endpoints for Browser API sessions (separate spec: browser-api.json)
• Async Unblocker and SERP API - /unblocker/req, /serp/req, /unblocker/get_result and /serp/get_result endpoints (separate spec: async-api-reference.json)
• Account management API - zones, IPs, balance and status endpoints such as /zone, /customer/balance and /status (main openapi.json)

MCP tools exposed

search_enginesearch_engine_batchscrape_as_markdownscrape_batchdiscoverscraping_browser_snapshotscraping_browser_click_refscraping_browser_screenshotweb_data_amazon_productweb_data_walmart_productweb_data_google_shoppingweb_data_linkedin_postsweb_data_tiktok_postsweb_data_youtube_videosweb_data_yahoo_finance_businessweb_data_crunchbase_companyweb_data_zoominfo_company_profileweb_data_zillow_properties_listingweb_data_github_repository_fileweb_data_reuter_newsweb_data_google_play_storeweb_data_apple_app_storeweb_data_booking_hotel_listingsweb_data_chatgpt_ai_insightsweb_data_grok_ai_insightsweb_data_perplexity_ai_insightsweb_data_npm_packageweb_data_pypi_packageextractscrape_as_html

Machine-readable spec

OpenAPI spec retrieved

Published by the vendor themselves — not community forks.

• brightdata-mcp2655 stars

  Official Bright Data MCP server exposing search, scrape, and structured web-data extraction tools (search_engine, scrape_as_markdown, web_data_* dataset tools, extract, and more), linked from Bright Data's own MCP docs.

Checked 2026-09-23 against their pricing page. Vendors change pricing without notice.

Bright Data is web-data infrastructure covering the full stack from raw proxies to fully unblocked scraping APIs to pre-built datasets.

Companies that need public web data at scale and can't rely on target sites having APIs: AI/ML teams training or grounding models on web data, eCommerce and market-research teams tracking competitor pricing, ad-tech and brand-protection teams, and developers building agents that need live search/scrape access via MCP.

Pricing is consumption-based and fragmented across products (Web Unlocker, SERP API, proxies, datasets each have separate pricing pages), so a team wanting one predictable monthly bill for mixed usage has to piece it together themselves; the Scale plan example ($499/mo for 383K Web Unlocker requests) can get expensive fast at high volume before Enterprise custom pricing kicks in. The free tier is a single shared 5,000-credits/month pool across the whole account (shared by the MCP server, Web Unlocker, SERP API, Scraper APIs, Scraper Studio and Browser API, and by all users on a team account), not per-project, so teams running multiple agents or projects off one Bright Data account will exhaust it quickly and need to fund the account for real usage.

Infrastructure for fetching web pages at scale — proxies, headless browsers, and crawl-to-markdown services that agents can call directly.

Category: Scraping and browser infrastructure. Membership is decided by 3 stated tests, not by category tags — see them and the full comparison.

ApifyAPIA marketplace of pre-built scrapers on top of the infrastructure, so common targets need no code at all.Browser UseAPIBrowserbaseAPIMCPFirecrawlAPICrawl-to-markdown aimed squarely at LLM ingestion; the output format is the product.OxylabsAPIScrapingBeeAPI

• An official YouTube video suitable for citation - the channel's video listing was not reviewed, so officialVideo is omitted rather than guessed
• The funded-account SERP API rate-limit figure: the 2026-07-31 record said 100 QPS, but the current SERP rate-limit doc states only the unfunded 1,000 req/min limit and points to the Control Panel, so no funded-account number is given