When we talk about "the web," most people think of the pages they can find through Google. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of the web—what researchers call the "deep web"—is invisible to search engines and traditional APIs.
This isn't about anything illicit. The deep web includes content behind login pages, results generated by search queries, dynamically generated pages, content loaded via JavaScript, data protected by CAPTCHAs or rate limits, and information in databases accessed through forms.
Estimates suggest this hidden web is 400-500 times larger than the surface web. That's where the really valuable information lives—the proprietary databases, the real-time pricing, the customer records, the booking systems.
Traditional automation approaches struggle with this complexity. APIs only cover a fraction of web services, and most companies don't offer public APIs at all. Screen scraping breaks constantly as websites update their designs. And the rise of sophisticated bot detection makes automated access increasingly difficult.
This is exactly the problem TinyFish was built to solve.
Our infrastructure approaches web interaction the way a human would—navigating pages visually, understanding context, adapting to changes. When a site requires authentication, our agents can log in. When content loads dynamically, they wait. When pages change, they adapt.
This isn't just a technical achievement. It's a fundamental shift in what's possible with AI agents. By unlocking the deep web, we're giving AI access to the same information and capabilities that humans have—at scale.
The surface web was just the beginning. The real value has always been underneath.