Definition
Web scraping is Web scraping is using software to automatically copy content from websites at scale, and AI companies use it to gather text and data for training models and for answering questions.
Web scraping is automated copying of what is on web pages. A program requests pages, reads the text, images or data in them and stores it. A person could do the same thing by hand with copy and paste. Scraping just does it thousands or millions of times.
Scraping usually starts with a web crawler, which finds pages by following links. A scraper then pulls the parts it wants from each page, such as article text, prices or product listings, and saves them in a structured form. Some scrapers pretend to be ordinary visitors. Others identify themselves honestly with a name that site owners can recognize.
Language models learn from enormous amounts of text, and much of it comes from the public web. That makes scraping a main source of training data. AI products also fetch pages live to answer a question, which is a form of scraping done at the moment you ask.
For site owners, this raises real questions. Their content may be used to build a product that competes with them. Their servers carry the load. And the benefit, such as visitors clicking through, may not come back.
It depends on the country, the data, how it was gathered and what it is used for. Public pages, copyrighted works, personal data and content behind a login are treated differently, and courts and regulators are still working through AI cases. This entry cannot settle it for your situation. If it matters to your business, ask a lawyer.
If you publish on the web, decide on purpose which crawlers you allow, and check what any agreement with a platform lets it do with your pages. If you build with scraped data, check the source's terms and keep a record of where the data came from.
Scraping feeds pretraining and retrieval-augmented generation, and it is a main reason the rules around training data are being argued over.
Web scraping is using software to automatically copy content from websites. AI companies use it to collect data for training models and to fetch pages when answering questions.
Use a robots.txt file to ask crawlers to stay out, block known crawlers at your server or CDN, and put sensitive content behind a login. Only the last two are enforced rather than requested.
Meta removed a clause from its updated commercial terms that would have let it use content from sites tied to business accounts to train its products, TechCrunch reports. The crawling permission stays, and it takes effect Oct. 30.
Meta pushed its new Commercial Terms, which let it crawl websites linked to business accounts, from Oct. 30 to Nov. 20 after publishers objected. It already dropped the word "train," but the crawling clause is still there, so read it before then.