Why Is My Bot Or Crawler Being Detected While Web Scraping And How Do I Avoid This?

Learn how to easily and successfully navigate your data mining through the online environment by following these simple steps.
2 min read
Why and how to avoid: Bot crawling being detected when web scraping and collecting data

With the rising need to collect vast amounts of accurate information, web scraping crawlers are becoming extremely common. Sites are catching on and implementing their own firewalls to block your data extraction efforts.

How does my target website know I am data mining?

This is mostly due to cookies, the browser user-agent, and your IP.

When web scraping/crawling your target website, the website saves cookies on your browser. The website recognizes a real browser by reading the request headers which include information about the user-agent. It also pays attention to the number of requests sent per IP, per minute. A crawler allows you to make many requests at a much faster rate than a human, which your target website will detect. Too many requests, a lack of cookies and/or an incorrect user-agent will trigger a website to provide an error response, print out misleading information or block you completely.

 
Head of the browser under the magnifying glass to reveal it is a bot

How do I avoid being detected while web scraping?

This can be avoided by programming the user-agent header (comprised of the browser type and version) to be seen as a real browser while maintaining the session cookies throughout the same session. When beginning a new session, clear the cookies and start again.

However, the most important aspect when avoiding detection is your IP address.

Your IP address is the one thing that can’t be coded as it is part of the network infrastructure.
To mimic a real-user, you need to limit the number of requests per IP. This is done by continuously rotating the IP address and is easily done using Bright Data’s Proxy Network. Not only the largest residential network in the world, but it also has the first Proxy Manager offering built-in automated proxy manipulations based on your specifications.

By properly managing your cookies, user-agent and IP you can avoid getting captchas, being blocked or fed misleading information by a target website while web scraping.

More from Bright Data

Datasets Icon
Get immediately structured data
Access reliable public web data for any use case. The datasets can be downloaded or delivered in a variety of formats. Subscribe to get fresh records of your preferred dataset based on a pre-defined schedule.
Web scraper IDE Icon
Build reliable web scrapers. Fast.
Build scrapers in a cloud environment with code templates and functions that speed up the development. This solution is based on Bright Data’s Web Unlocker and proxy infrastructure making it easy to scale and never get blocked.
Web Unlocker Icon
Implement an automated unlocking solution
Boost the unblocking process with fingerprint management, CAPTCHA-solving, and IP rotation. Any scraper, written in any language, can integrate it via a regular proxy interface.

Ready to get started?