Web crawling vs. web scraping: what's the difference, and do you need either?

Web crawling and web scraping serve distinct purposes: crawling discovers web pages and URLs, while scraping extracts specific data from those pages. Confusing the two can lead to inefficient systems, such as building a crawler when target URLs are already known or scraping pages without a discovery strategy. The guide explains how crawling and scraping can work together, their limitations, the role of robots.txt in governing automated access, and how AI builders may sometimes avoid both approaches.

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