JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate. JSON is text-based and uses a syntax that is familiar to programmers who use JavaScript, but it is language-independent. It represents data structures in a simple, hierarchical manner using key-value pairs and arrays. JSON is widely used in web APIs and data interchange between web servers and clients, making it a common format for data extraction and processing in web scraping tasks.