The Missing Layer in Agentic AI — Giedrius Šteimantas, Oxylabs
Aug 26, 2026 · 15:04
Giedrius Šteimantas of Oxylabs argues the missing layer in agentic AI is web scraping infrastructure, applying ten years of scraping rules to make agents cheaper and more reliable. His friend's shopping agent used a browser for everything, hit CAPTCHAs, and wasted tokens. Rebuilding it, he replaces discovery's browser and fixed retailer list with Oxylabs' fast search API (under 2,000 tokens, under 700 milliseconds), and the decision stage with a scraper API that returns markdown, fails loudly, runs hundreds of parallel requests, and bills only for successful results. Checkout needs a browser, so Playwright MCP connects to Oxylabs' headless browser with stealth, residential proxy, and geolocation. Cost matters: use a browser only when necessary, validate content—HTTP 200 does not mean valid.
