What is web crawling?

Answer

Web crawling is the automated process of discovering and fetching web pages by following links so you can build an index or dataset. A crawler usually starts from a seed list of URLs and expands as it finds new links. It tracks which pages it has visited to avoid loops and duplicates. Many crawlers also revisit pages on a schedule to detect updates. The output is typically a list of URLs plus page content and metadata. This data can power search, monitoring, or analytics workflows.