A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This process is called Web crawling or ...

In the early days of the internet, robots went by many names: spiders, crawlers, worms, WebAnts, web crawlers. Most of the time, they were built with good intentions.

Use robots.txt to block crawlers from "action URLs." This prevents wasted server resources from useless crawler hits. It's an age-old best practice that remains relevant today.