Web crawling, commonly referred to as spidering or web scraping, involves using automated bots known as crawlers or spiders to browse the Web and gather data or content from websites. This data could then be used for indexing, search, or competitive intelligence, for example.
Crawling usually starts with a seed URL or a list of URLs and navigates through web pages by links found on the page. The primary objective is to copy all pages and their content to use it later.