Large-scale content extraction from a webpage is called web crawling. This might entail getting a number of online pages or the whole website. The pages' text alone, all of the HTML, or both the HTML and pictures from each page may be included in the saved material.

The process of scanning a webpage can be done in a variety of ways. Manually getting online sites is the most fundamental. You can accomplish this by either copying and pasting the text from each website into a text editor or by saving local versions of individual pages using your browser's File Save As... function. Web scraper software allows for automated extraction as well. This is the most typical method for downloading many documents at once from a website. In some circumstances, bots can be used to regularly scan a website.

Web scraping may be done for several different purposes. For instance, you may want to archive a section of a website for offline access. By downloading several pages to your computer, you can read them at a later time without being connected to the Internet. Web developers sometimes scrape their own websites when testing for broken links and images within each page. Scraping can also done for unlawful purposes, such as copying a website and republishing it under a different name. This type of scraping is viewed as a copyright violation and can lead to legal prosecution.

While scanning a website for the sole intent of posting information again is never acceptable, doing so may nonetheless be against the conditions of service of the website in question. Therefore, before getting material from a website, you should always study the conditions of service.