Scraping Ethically: A Practical Guide to Respectful Web Crawling The single most important thing to understand about web scraping is this: ethical crawling is not a legal gray area—it’s a technical and reputational survival strategy. If you scrape without respecting robots.txt, rate limits, and site terms, you will get blocked, your IPs will be burned, and you may face legal action. In 2023, the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn that ...