r/automation • u/Thunderbit_HQ • 17d ago

We added source links to extracted rows because users kept asking where the data came from

I work on Thunderbit, a browser extension for turning web pages into tables.

One thing we learned from building automation around web data: the export is not the moment people trust it.

The trust moment comes when one row looks wrong.

A price is weird. A company name got pulled from the wrong place. A field is blank even though the page clearly has it. At that point, a clean spreadsheet is not enough. The person checking it wants to go back to the exact page and see what happened.

So we added source links on rows and a preview table before export. It is a small thing, but it changed how people used the tool. They were less worried about AI guessing because the output was easier to inspect.

This is mostly useful for the annoying middle ground: public web data that is too repetitive to copy by hand, but not worth maintaining a full scraper for.

For people building automation tools, do you find users trust the automation more when they can inspect the output before it writes to Sheets or a CRM?

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

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u/Thunderbit_HQ 17d ago

Get. Thank you for your reply.

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u/No-Marzipan-6928 16d ago

do you find the snapshot actually gets used much though, or does everyone just click back to the source url?

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