Price extraction from websites is a key task for market monitoring, price comparison, and business analytics in e-commerce. Existing approaches can be broadly divided into four groups, and understanding their trade-offs in accuracy and scalability is essential for selecting suitable extraction strategies. Classical methods rely on manually written wrappers and rule induction from labeled pages, offering high accuracy but adapting poorly to structural changes and requiring considerable maintenance effort. Browser-based methods, using tools such as Selenium and Puppeteer, handle dynamic JavaScript content but consume large computational resources and scale poorly. Browserless approaches retrieve HTML directly via HTTP requests, offering significant gains in speed and cost, but rely on rules calibrated for specific sites. Methods based on machine learning and large language models offer adaptability but require training data and substantial computation. Our main contribution is an adaptive browserless price extraction system that improves robustness to structural differences between websites. We implemented a baseline architecture combining HTML page fragmentation with syntactic, semantic, and frequency rules, and extended it in two ways: a Bayesian approach that dynamically updates rule weights, and a genetic algorithm that optimizes the system's global parameters. This hybrid scheme increased precision from 77.2% to 87.3% and reduced average per-page processing time by approximately 14% relative to the baseline, confirming it as a competitive alternative to manually tuned browserless solutions and to more resource-intensive browser- or LLM-based methods, offering high extraction accuracy at low computational cost.
Web content extraction is essential for reliable LLM data pipelines, yet existing methods often struggle to jointly satisfy accuracy, scalability, and adaptability. General-purpose extractors can be applied broadly, but they are often brittle on publisher-specific layouts and richer extraction targets such as metadata, images, and tables. Direct LLM-based extraction offers greater flexibility, but incurs substantial cost and latency at scale, while manually engineered publisher-specific parsers can achieve high accuracy but require substantial human effort to build and maintain. We introduce PACE, an agentic framework for learning publisher-specific extraction configurations from representative pages and user requirements. During training, PACE uses LLMs to analyze page structure and aggregate reusable extraction patterns. At inference time, the learned configurations instantiate a fixed deterministic extractor template, enabling scalable extraction without additional LLM calls. Experiments spanning article-body, metadata, and multimodal extraction show that PACE outperforms scalable non-manual baselines while approaching the quality of manually engineered publisher-specific parsers. PACE achieves stronger extraction of article text, metadata, images, and tables, demonstrating that agentic configuration learning can automate publisher-specific extraction for LLM-ready page representations beyond article text.