Definition
Plain language
Automatically pulling data off websites with a program that reads the pages, rather than a person browsing them.
As stated in the literature
Programmatic extraction of content from web pages, typically by fetching HTML and parsing it; AI agents that scrape aggressively can trigger rate limits and captchas, and may incur legal exposure under statutes like the CFAA.
Also called: scraping, scrape, scrapes, scraped
Why it matters: It enables fast, large-scale data collection, but doing it aggressively can get an agent blocked, throttled, or even into legal trouble.
For example, a program might automatically visit hundreds of product pages and pull out every price into a spreadsheet without a person clicking through them.
Heard on the show
“It scrapes the site's robots file and sitemap.”Episode 061 — When Helpful Agents Go Sideways: A 404 Error, Campus Security, and Why Alignment Misses This