Web scraping without getting blocked: 9 techniques that work

Getting blocked is the most common scraping headache. These nine techniques keep your crawls flowing.

1. Rotate proxies — spread requests across IPs, ideally geo-targeted to the site's audience.
2. Send realistic headers — a full, consistent browser header set, not a lone User-Agent.
3. Rotate user agents — vary the browser fingerprint across runs.
4. Throttle per host — add delays and cap concurrency; AutoThrottle adapts to latency.
5. Respect robots.txt — it reduces friction and legal risk.
6. Render JavaScript — use a headless browser for sites that detect non-browser clients.
7. Solve CAPTCHAs — integrate a solver for the occasional challenge.
8. Crawl incrementally — skip unchanged pages to cut request volume.
9. Retry with backoff — handle transient blocks gracefully instead of hammering.

Crawley Cloud includes proxies, stealth headers, AutoThrottle, JS rendering, CAPTCHA solving and incremental crawling — so most of this is just a checkbox.