Web scraping is the automated process of extracting and copying specific data from websites, essentially an advanced, robotic copy-paste for large-scale data collection, often using bots to fetch pages and parse content into structured formats like databases or spreadsheets for analysis, market research, price comparison, or lead generation. While manual copy-paste is a form of scraping, the term usually refers to automated tools that “read” web pages to gather information for other applications, bypassing manual effort.