From URL to JSON in 10 Seconds: How to Scrape Goodreads with Decodo (No Coding!)

Introduction

You want to discover the perfect next book on Goodreads, but you’re faced with huge lists and scattered information. Extracting key data (titles, authors, average ratings, number of reviews) from lists like “Inspiring Books” is tedious and time-consuming. These lists can have thousands of entries across dozens of pages, making it nearly impossible to quickly filter the best options.

The traditional way to extract this data requires technical skills: inspecting complex HTML structures, handling fragile selectors, and managing proxies to avoid being blocked. Imagine trying to gather details for 4,532 books spread across 46 pages by yourself — a process full of errors and frustration. On top of that, Goodreads uses inconsistent formatting (for example, 3,426,095 reviews with commas, ratings with different decimal precision), and some fields might even be missing for books with fewer reviews. This makes traditional scraping even harder, requiring lots of post-processing.

What if you could get all this data in seconds, in a clean, structured format — without writing a single line of code? This is where Decodo’s AI Parser comes in. This free tool uses the power of AI and Decodo’s massive infrastructure (with over 125M rotating IPs worldwide) to extract structured data from any website. No complex setups, no fragile code — just tell the AI what you want, and it delivers clean JSON data. In this guide, we’ll walk you step by step through how we used Decodo’s AI Parser to turn Goodreads’ “Inspiring Books” list — with thousands of books — into a clean dataset of titles, authors, ratings, and reviews in seconds.

Why scraping Goodreads lists is tricky

Before jumping to the solution, let’s understand why getting data from Goodreads lists is challenging:

• Complex dynamic structure: Each entry in a Goodreads list includes multiple nested elements: ranking, title, author, average rating, number of reviews, list score, and votes. These are scattered across different HTML sections and can change with design updates.
• Massive data volume: Popular lists often contain thousands of books. For example, “Inspiring Books” has 4,532 books across 46 pages. Collecting the full dataset means dealing with pagination and large numbers of requests.
• Inconsistent formatting: Goodreads displays numbers with localized formatting (like “3,426,095” instead of “3426095”), and ratings can vary in decimal precision. Some fields may be missing altogether for less popular books. This means heavy manual data cleaning if you’re scraping the site the traditional way.

Solution: AI Parser Step-by-Step for Goodreads

Decodo’s AI Parser simplifies this entire process dramatically. Here’s how we used it to extract key data from the “Inspiring Books” list in seconds — no coding required.

Step 1: Access AI Parser in Decodo

First, log in to your Decodo account and open AI Parser from the dashboard. The tool is completely free to use and doesn’t require proxy setup or any infrastructure. You’re automatically leveraging Decodo’s global network of 125M+ rotating IPs, so you can scrape virtually any site without worrying about blocks.

Step 2: Paste the target URL

Paste the URL of the Goodreads list page you want to extract data from. For our example, we used:

This is page 1 of the list, which shows the first ~100 books. Tip: For lists with multiple pages, you can repeat the process for subsequent pages or use Decodo’s Web Scraping API to automate pagination.

Step 3: Define the perfect prompt

Here’s where the magic happens. Instead of inspecting HTML or writing CSS selectors, you simply tell the AI what you want in plain language. We used this structured prompt to extract titles, authors, average ratings, and the number of reviews:

AI Parser interprets the page and outputs exactly what we requested — no coding, no trial-and-error with selectors.

Step 4: Get clean JSON data instantly

In under 10 seconds, AI Parser gives us clean, structured JSON. Here’s a sample from the “Inspiring Books” list:

[
  {
    "title": "The Alchemist",
    "author": "Paulo Coelho",
    "average_rating": 3.92,
    "number_of_reviews": "3,426,095"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Little Prince",
    "author": "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry",
    "average_rating": 4.33,
    "number_of_reviews": "2,372,352"
  },
  {
    "title": "Man's Search for Meaning",
    "author": "Viktor E. Frankl",
    "average_rating": 4.37,
    "number_of_reviews": "831,204"
  }
]        

No messy HTML, no post-processing — just clean data ready for analysis.

Why AI Parser is a game changer

Speed & simplicity: Go from URL to clean JSON in seconds — no coding required. Scalable: Built-in proxies and anti-blocking with 125M+ IPs. Flexible: Works not just for Goodreads, but also for product lists, movie databases, review pages, and more. Accessible: Anyone can use it, even without technical knowledge.

Beyond Goodreads: Endless use cases

Once you’ve mastered your prompt, you can reuse it for:

• Genre lists: Extract top books by genre (sci-fi, biographies, business).
• Trending lists: Track “Best of the Year” or “New releases” lists regularly.
• Other websites: Works just as well for movie rankings, e-commerce product pages, review platforms, and more.

Conclusion

Decodo’s AI Parser transforms web scraping from a technical headache into a fast, no-code, AI-powered workflow. In just a few clicks, we turned Goodreads’ “Inspiring Books” list into a clean dataset of titles, authors, ratings, and reviews — ready to analyze, filter, or integrate anywhere.

Stop wasting hours on manual data collection or fragile scripts. Try Decodo’s AI Parser today and turn any website into clean, structured data in seconds.

👉 Get started with AI Parser here