Robots.txt is a text file that implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol to instruct web robots on how to interact with a website, specifying which bots can visit, what pages they can access, and at what frequency. This is crucial for ethical web scraping, as it helps avoid legal issues, reduces server load, and prevents triggering anti-bot measures by respecting the site's directives. Ignoring robots.txt can lead to blocked IPs, legal actions, and increased scrutiny. Understanding directives like User-agent, Disallow, Allow, Crawl-delay, and Request-rate is essential for compliance. While robots.txt can guide web scraping, anti-scraping solutions might still block access, which can be mitigated by using proxy servers, such as those provided by Bright Data, which offers a vast network of datacenter, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies.