[ffsm8]

I'm honestly confused here, if anything, aren't your quotes literally confirming my point?

It's triggering an automation which fetches data. This is a crawl, even if the crawl has a very limited scope (it's also not limited to a single request, that's just the scope that's used by default. But even if it was programmatically limited to only ever request a single resource, that'd still be a crawl, while recursion is the norm too build indexes, it's not necessary for all usecases that utilize crawlers.

Did you ever actually make anything that's utilizing them to gather information that you want? You might be surprised to know that adhoc triggering a singular resource fetch is actually pretty common to keep data up-to-date.

> If I issue a curl request from a server that I'm renting, is that a robot request? What about if I'm using Firefox on a remote desktop? What about if I self-host a client like Perplexity on a local server?

Yes, anything on a third device is effectively a robot that's acting on the behalf of the acteur.