Five of the web’s biggest data-scraping brands now sit under one $3.6 billion umbrella, and AI agents are the reason why | Daily Reports Online
- Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain now formally sit under one Vilnius-based umbrella called Source
- Source claims AI agents drove a fourfold increase in demand for services across its organizations
- The brands, previously reviewed as rivals, including three of TechRadar’s nine best-proxy picks, now officially share common oversight
Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Honeygain have formally come together under a single name, Source, and the Lithuanian group behind them says AI agents are why it needed one.
The Vilnius-based ecosystem claims demand across its companies has risen fourfold in a year as AI agents, next-generation search tools, and frontier AI products pull live data from the web.
Its systems now process 1.5 million requests per second, and that it is expanding into web search APIs built specifically for AI agents.
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One umbrella with five different, competing shopfronts?
Source presents itself as a backbone rather than a business. Its launch post says it has no customers or products of its own; instead, it handles patents, procurement, hiring, and compliance, while each brand keeps its own team, product strategy, and customer base.
The brands are split by customer type. Oxylabs serves enterprises and AI labs; Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) targets the mid-market; ScrapingBee sells developer APIs; Webshare serves professional consumers and solo builders; and Honeygain pays ordinary people for their spare bandwidth.
For anyone shopping for a proxy service, this is the most practical takeaway. Oxylabs bought Webshare in 2022 and ScrapingBee in 2025, and Honeygain became its main residential proxy sourcing partner in 2021.
Decodo’s ties were less clear-cut until now, and trade site Proxyway notes that the launch officially links Oxylabs and Decodo under one organization. Source CEO Vytautas Savickas ran Decodo until March 2026, when he moved across to lead the Oxylabs group and founder Julius Černiauskas became chairman.
All of this points to a marriage of convenience rather than a merger by organizations that are already very closely interlinked. This is interesting because some of these brands have been sold and reviewed as alternatives to one another.
The best example of this is that three of the nine picks in TechRadar’s own best proxy sites guide now belong to Source: Decodo as best overall, Oxylabs as best for business, and Webshare as best for privacy.
For context on the overlap, our residential proxy roundup described Oxylabs as one of Decodo’s toughest competitors. Source says the companies remain fully independent in strategy, customers, and market presence, and that may well hold commercially, but common oversight is now a matter of record.
The release provided to TechRadar says Source gives the group “a unified voice in defending responsible access to public web data,” and its legal history explains the appetite.
Reddit sued Oxylabs alongside Perplexity, SerpApi and AWMProxy in October 2025, alleging they evaded its anti-scraping measures by lifting Reddit content from Google search results. Oxylabs said it was “shocked and disappointed” and would defend itself.
It was still listed as a defendant in filings this spring, and in late July a federal judge allowed Reddit’s core claims against SerpApi and Perplexity to proceed. Further back, a Texas jury awarded rival Bright Data nearly $7.5 million against Oxylabs in a 2021 patent case.
Source’s own essay on AI agents and the open web argues that if access is negotiated one licensing deal at a time, only the biggest companies will be able to afford it. This makes a convenient argument for a large web scraping group, but the gatekeeping fears are real.
The most concrete product promised here is AI search, and it is older than the umbrella itself: Oxylabs already offers a Web API that pairs a search endpoint with a scraping endpoint for agents, so the “dedicated AI Search APIs” promised look more like an expansion of existing work than a new product line.
For customers, the questions to watch are whether the brands keep competing on price, how clearly each one discloses their newfound relationship, and how the Reddit case plays out for Oxylabs.
For everyone else, Source is a bet that AI agents will keep needing the live web, and that the companies supplying the pipes deserve a seat at the table when the rules for that access get written, aiming to negotiate from a clustered position of strength.
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