Jackett works as a proxy server, it translates queries from apps (Sonarr, Radarr, SickRage, CouchPotato, Mylar, etc) into tracker-site-specific http queries, parses the html response, then sends results back to the requesting software.
This allows for getting recent uploads (like RSS) and performing searches.
Jackett is a single repository of maintained indexer scraping and translation logic - removing the burden from other apps.