Five Scraping Brands Unite as Source, a $3.6B AI Data Bet

What exactly is Source?

Source is not a new scraper. It is a holding structure: a Vilnius-based group that handles patents, procurement, hiring and compliance for five brands that keep their own teams, products and customers.

The five shopfronts are split by buyer. Oxylabs sells to 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.

Source CEO Vytautas Savickas ran Decodo until March 2026, when he moved across to lead the Oxylabs group and founder Julius Černiauskas became chairman. The ties were already deep: Oxylabs bought Webshare in 2022 and ScrapingBee in 2025, and Honeygain became its main residential proxy sourcing partner in 2021.

That history matters for shoppers. Three of the nine picks in TechRadar's best proxy sites guide — Decodo as best overall, Oxylabs as best for business and Webshare as best for privacy — now belong to the same organization. They have been reviewed as rivals, and in at least one roundup Oxylabs was described as one of Decodo's toughest competitors.

Why AI agents are the growth engine

Source says 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.

The scale claim is concrete: Source says its systems now process 1.5 million requests per second. That is the kind of number that only makes sense when software, not people, is doing the asking.

The product push is AI search. Oxylabs already offers a Web API that pairs a search endpoint with a scraping endpoint for agents, so the "dedicated AI Search APIs" Source promises look more like an expansion of existing work than a brand-new line. This fits a wider pattern: as agentic AI adoption climbs in enterprises, every agent that books, compares or researches something needs fresh web data to do it.

The legal fight hanging over the merger

Consolidation gives Source a unified voice, and its legal history explains why it wants one.

Reddit sued Oxylabs alongside Perplexity, SerpApi and AWMProxy in October 2025, alleging they evaded 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. That is a convenient argument for a large scraping group, but the gatekeeping fear is real. For customers, the questions to watch are whether the brands keep competing on price, how clearly each discloses the relationship, and how the Reddit case plays out for Oxylabs.

What it means for you

For buyers in the US, UK and EU, nothing changes at checkout today. Decodo, Oxylabs, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Honeygain keep their own pricing, dashboards and support, and Source says the companies remain independent in strategy and market presence.

The practical risk is choice. If the same parent sets procurement and compliance across five brands, the price competition that made them alternatives to each other could soften over time. Watch the next round of plan changes rather than the press release.

Source is a bet that AI agents will keep needing the live web, and that the companies supplying the pipes should negotiate from a clustered position of strength. Whether that produces better access or simply less competition is the part customers will feel first.