Scraping and crawling are techniques used to automate data retrieval from the Web. Key differences between the two include their goals and processes.
Web crawling is the process of extracting data from a website. It aims to cover as many pages as possible (ideally all that exist) and retrieve all content from them. Crawling does not aim to circumvent protections against robots such as CAPTCHA or limit the number of requests from a single IP.
Scraping is the process of extracting specific data from web pages. It is more targeted and aims to obtain particular information from a page, such as prices or product descriptions, event dates, or user emails. Unlike web crawling, the scraping process uses various techniques to circumvent blockages, for example, rotating proxies, changing the browser’s User Agent, and emulating user behaviour.