Web Scraping
Web scraping is the automated extraction of information from web pages, where software loads pages and pulls specific content into a structured format such as a spreadsheet or database.
Also called: data scraping, web data extraction
Why it matters
Much of the information that qualifies an account lives on public web pages: what a company sells, who it hires, which customers it lists, what it published recently. Scraping turns those pages into fields a team can filter and score, which is useful when no data provider has the specific attribute a campaign depends on. It also feeds AI research and personalization.
Scraping differs from crawling, which discovers and follows links across a site, and from using an API, where the site owner provides structured data on purpose. Teams that scrape need to respect each site's terms of service, robots.txt instructions, rate limits and privacy law, and they should store what they collect so it is not fetched twice.
Example
A company that sells software to restaurant groups wants to know which prospects run more than ten locations. Its data provider does not track this. The team scrapes each prospect's locations page, counts the listed addresses, and writes the number into a column beside the company domain, then targets only groups above the threshold.
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