Companies fiercely protect their data because competitors scraping it can steal their advantage. To stay ahead, they invest in sophisticated defenses set to block scraping attempts and keep their information locked down.
If you need that data for research, analysis, or competitive insights, and you’ve hit those access restrictions, this blog is for you.
We’ll discuss the most common anti-scraping techniques and how to bypass each.
What is Anti-Scraping?
Anti-scrapers are website security guards.
Scraping is when external bots automatically extract content from a website. Anti-scraping, on the other hand, is the defense system specifically made to detect and block these automated extraction attempts.
To protect themselves, websites deploy a mix of clever techniques: monitoring user behavior like mouse movements and clicks, flagging suspicious IP addresses (especially if one is making an enormous number of requests), and tracking data access spikes over a short time.
In simple terms, anti-scraping is any tool, technique, or approach that blocks bots or scrapers from extracting a website’s content.
How to Bypass Anti-Scraping Mechanisms with a Simple API?
Just like websites have anti-scraping tactics to block bots, there are ways to bypass them and access the content.
Some common methods include rotating IP addresses, which simply means changing IP addresses using VPNs or proxy servers, so websites think the traffic is coming from multiple devices. Then there’s solving CAPTCHAs, adding random delays between mouse clicks and scrolls, and changing user agents in HTTP requests.
While these are common methods, some advanced techniques use AI to detect and bypass anti-scraping tools. For example, AI-based image or audio recognition can detect and bypass CAPTCHAs.
Sounds complex, right? That’s where tools like ScraperAPI come in. You send your request to their API, and everything (IP rotation, JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA bypassing) happens behind the scenes.
So, with a simple API call, you’ll get the content without manually fighting the anti-scraping techniques.
Top 7 Anti-Scraping Techniques in 2025 and How to Bypass Them
1. Login Wall or Auth Wall
A login wall, as the name suggests, is a front gate to website access. To get through, users have to sign in with valid login details.
Bots, which typically don’t have valid credentials, often fail to scrape the data behind login walls. This is most common on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media sites.
How to bypass login walls?
After logging in to a website, some scraping scripts save the session cookies and reuse them in future scraping requests. This makes the website think it’s still a logged-in session, so it doesn’t ask you to log in again.
Is bypassing login walls this way legal? The legality depends on the situation, how you extract the data, and how you use it. Check out this guide to learn how to scrape data safely.
2. IP Address blocking
Anti-scraping tools often use IP addresses and their metadata to decide whether to allow website access.
An IP address looks something like this: 192.168.1.100 It follows the IPv4 format of four numbers separated by dots. Which part of an IP address refers to the network or host is determined by the subnet mask, not the position of specific numbers. IP addresses can reveal general geographic location based on how ISPs assign them, and users on the same network or ISP segment. The last part of the IP address may distinguish devices within a network, but many users can still share the same public IP due to NAT (Network Address Translation).
Anti-scraping systems use this information to detect unusual patterns. If a single IP or a series of similar IPs starts sending too many requests, it raises a red flag.
There’s also rate limiting. Websites set a cap on how many requests a single IP can make in a short timeframe. If you go over that limit, your access will be cut off.
To make things tighter, websites keep a blacklist of suspicious IPs, IP ranges, and high-risk geographic locations. If your IP shows up in that database, expect restrictions.
How to Bypass IP Blocking?
Using proxy servers is one of the most common techniques to bypass IP-based restrictions.
A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your computer and the website. When you send a request, it goes to the proxy first, which then forwards the request to the website using its own IP address. The website’s response is received by the proxy and then relayed back to your computer.
There are different types of proxy servers. Residential proxies help bypass many advanced anti-scraping systems by using IP addresses assigned to real residential devices, making them appear as genuine users.
Tools like ScraperAPI make it simple. ScraperAPI provides access to over 4 million residential proxies, plus data center proxies, mobile proxies, and e-commerce-specific ones. It automatically rotates these IP addresses behind the scenes, so you can keep scraping without hitting restrictions.
3. User-Agent and HTTP Headers
User agents are a part of HTTP headers. They tell the website what browser you’re using, its version, and your operating system.
Legit User agents look more like this: `user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36 Edg/101.0.1210.47`
But, when you send a Python request, the default User-Agent looks like `user-agent: python-requests/2.22.0`, which is easy to detect and block.
Some websites inspect the User-Agent string and block requests that don’t match those of major browsers like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. Because these browsers frequently update their user-agent strings, using an outdated or uncommon one can sometimes raise suspicion.
What about skipping the User-Agent entirely? That’s also a red flag and can lead to being blocked.
How to Bypass User-Agent?
Customizing user agents with recent browser versions helps blend in with regular traffic. Rotating user-agent strings is also important when sending multiple requests.
But manually managing and rotating headers at enterprise scale can be challenging. That’s where ScraperAPI steps in. It rotates user agents and IPs for each request, ensuring smooth data access. With ScraperAPI, everything is automated through a simple API call, delivering a 99.99% success rate.
4. Honeypots
Websites set traps to catch bots called Honeypots. When scrapers trigger these traps, the site logs their IPs and may blacklist them.
For example, websites place hidden links in areas that are invisible to humans. Bots don’t see the page like humans, but they parse the raw HTML and interact with all elements, including hidden ones. This allows websites to spot the difference, collect bot information, and block their access.
Another common example is hidden fields in web forms. These fields are invisible to users, so when a real person fills out the form, the field stays empty. But scrapers often fill every form field they find in the HTML, including hidden ones, because they don’t distinguish visible from hidden fields. That difference in behavior helps websites spot and stop bots.
How to Bypass Honeypots
Ensure your scraper skips interacting with hidden elements with properties set like `display: none` or `visibility: hidden`.
When using proxies, if a honeypot detects suspicious activity, it typically results in blacklisting the proxy IP rather than your real IP, assuming all requests go through the proxy. Proper proxy rotation helps reduce the risk of bans. Still, if you want to avoid the trap altogether, use ScraperAPI. It’s designed to avoid honeypot traps by automatically managing proxy rotation, browser emulation, and other anti-bot techniques through a simple API call.
5. JavaScript challenges
Sometimes, when you open a website, there’s a slight delay before the page fully loads. That’s a JavaScript challenge running in the background.
Here’s what’s happening: a JavaScript file is injected into your browser and prompts it to execute a script. Real browsers handle it easily. They run the script, store a token in a cookie, and if that token is validated by the server, access is granted.
Scrapers without a JavaScript engine cannot run that script, so they get blocked.
How to bypass JavaScript challenges?
Use a headless browser with JavaScript enabled. Headless Chromium (via Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium) executes JavaScript just like a real browser. These tools also support plugins like `puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth` or options like `contextOptions` to fake screen sizes and device profiles. This makes the site believe a real Chrome browser is running the JavaScript challenge.
For more reliable scraping of Javascript-protected sites, combine a headless browser with a Scraper API. Or just use ScraperAPI on its own. It comes with a built-in headless browser to render JavaScript and includes other bypass techniques like proxy servers, IP rotation, CAPTCHA handling, and more.
6. CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHAs are challenges—like checking a box, typing some text, or clicking on the right images—that humans can solve easily before accessing a protected website. But for bots and scrapers, they’re a nightmare.
Most secure websites use CAPTCHAs as a first line of defense. And even if you get past the initial page load, background monitoring continues. If the site picks up on anything unusual, it’ll throw a CAPTCHA your way to make sure you’re human before letting you continue.
How to bypass CAPTCHAs?
Instead of solving CAPTCHAs, it’s easier and cheaper to avoid triggering them in the first place.
Websites often present CAPTCHAs when they detect suspicious behavior. So, rotating IPs, rotating user agents, and clearing cookies between requests can help you prevent them. Avoiding honeypots and adding random delays between requests also lowers your chances of running into a CAPTCHA.
When you use ScraperAPI, it handles this automatically. The platform monitors for CAPTCHA-triggered failures, and if one is detected, it retries the request using a different IP to bypass it.
If you do end up facing a CAPTCHA, the last resort is solving it. There are third-party CAPTCHA-solving services you can plug into your scraping setup. But these can get expensive, so it’s best to avoid CAPTCHAs altogether using the prevention steps above.
7. User Behavior Analysis
Humans have a natural way of moving the mouse, clicking, and scrolling. But bots typically perform these actions with precision and fixed timing. For example, a bot might move the mouse from point A to B with linear, inhuman precision, click immediately after landing on a button, or scroll a page with no pauses.
Websites collect this interaction data and run it through behavioral analysis or machine learning models, which can spot patterns and distinguish bots from real users.
How to bypass user behavior analysis?
The key difference here is behavior—how users interact versus how bots operate. So to bypass user behavior analysis (UBA), your bot needs to act as human as possible.
That means typing at a natural speed with randomized delays, clicking at varied intervals (not perfectly timed), and mimicking real scrolling patterns.
For this, tools like Selenium or Puppeteer come in handy. They can simulate real human interactions with the website.
Another reliable method is replaying real user behavior. This involves recording an actual session of a human using the site—every click, scroll, pause, and typo—and replaying that interaction using an automated script with the same timing and flow, though it works best when combined with consistent browser and device fingerprints.
Conclusion
Now you know all the essential anti-scraping techniques and how to bypass each of them. But handling all of them manually is complex, time-consuming, and often not enough. Some websites use advanced defense systems that can still block access, even when every precaution is in place.
ScraperAPI simplifies the entire process by automatically handling anti-scraping measures and delivering consistent data access through a single API call. Want to see it in action? Book a free custom trial and test ScraperAPI on your exact use case.