• December 19, 2025
How do AI companies build web crawlers?

AI companies that train search, recommendation, or language models need a steady stream of fresh pages, feeds, and files from the public internet. That work is done by crawlers: distributed systems that fetch content, discover new URLs, and revisit known pages to detect updates. Building a crawler that runs continuously is less about a single “bot” and more about orchestration, scheduling, data hygiene, and resilience.