Scraping Metacritic in 2026: Metascores, Reviews, and Game Data Without API Keys

Metacritic doesn't offer a public API. Never has. But there's a clean way to get structured Metascores, reviews, and game data without API keys, without headless browsers, and without fragile HTML parsing. The key insight: Metacritic's frontend is powered by a backend API at backend.metacritic.com that returns clean JSON. You can hit it directly with standard HTTP requests. Let's build a Metacritic scraper from scratch. Prerequisites pip install httpx beautifulsoup4 We'll use httpx for async HTTP requests and beautifulsoup4 as a fallback for any HTML parsing needs. But the main approach is pure API calls — no HTML parsing required for most data. Understanding Metacritic's Backend API Open your browser's DevTools on any Metacritic page and watch the Network tab. You'll see requests going to backend.metacritic.com . These endpoints return JSON with all the data the frontend needs — scores, reviews, release dates, platforms, descriptions. The key headers you need: import httpx HEADERS = {