Every few days someone in a scraping forum asks a version of the same question: "I'm collecting documentation text for an AI tool, but the pages render with JavaScript. What's the lightest way to get the content?"
The answers are always the same — open DevTools, check the Network tab, find the XHR. That advice is correct, and for documentation sites specifically it's usually unnecessary work.
Documentation sites are not arbitrary web apps. They're overwhelmingly built by a handful of static site generators, and those generators leave the content sitting in predictable places. Three routes cover most of what you'll hit, and none of them need a browser.
Route 1: the JSON is already in the HTML
Next.js-based docs (which includes a large share of company developer portals) embed the full page payload in a __NEXT_DATA__ script tag. It's in the initial HTML response — no JavaScript execution needed.
