Building Reliable Web Scrapers: Why API-First Beats CSS Selectors Every Time

I've built web scrapers for years, and here's the one lesson I keep relearning: CSS selectors will betray you. Every time a website redesigns, your carefully crafted $('.review-card .star-rating') breaks silently. You don't even know until a user reports getting empty results. So when I built my latest collection of 40+ data tools, I took a different approach. The API-First Architecture Level 1: Official APIs (Best stability) Some platforms have public APIs that are more stable than any HTML parsing: Reddit has a JSON API — just append .json to any URL YouTube has the Innertube API — no API key needed, no quota limits Bluesky uses the AT Protocol — completely public, no auth needed for profiles Hacker News uses Firebase + Algolia — hasn't changed in years Stack Overflow has the Stack Exchange API v2.3 Wikipedia has the MediaWiki API (40+ languages) arXiv has an Atom XML API for research papers Level 2: Structured Data (Good stability) When there's no API, look for JSON-LD or Schema.org