Before anything else: scrape responsibly. Stick to public data, honor a site's terms and its robots directives, and don't hammer infrastructure you don't own. The goal of everything below isn't to defeat security — it's to keep legitimate, well-behaved collection from being mistaken for abuse. Sites block traffic that looks automated and aggressive; the fix is to not look that way.
Why scrapers get blocked
Defenses look for patterns a human wouldn't produce: hundreds of requests a minute from one IP, perfectly regular timing, missing cookies, identical or absent headers, and traffic from networks known for automation. None of these alone is damning, but they stack. The antidote is to reduce each signal — spread the load, vary the timing, look like a real browser, and start from an address that isn't already on a list.
The playbook, step by step
Rotation and pacing, in practice
Rotation spreads your requests across many residential IPs so no single address accumulates a suspicious history — the foundation of staying unblocked at volume. But rotation without pacing still trips alarms: even across many IPs, a site can notice an inhuman surge. Add delays between requests, introduce a bit of randomness so the rhythm isn't mechanical, and back off when a target signals it's had enough. Most bans come from being greedy, not from being detected outright. When a task needs continuity instead of variety — a login, a multi-page flow — switch to a sticky session so the sequence holds together. The full breakdown is in rotating vs sticky proxies.
Headers, sessions, and clean IPs
Make each request look like it came from a real browser: a believable user-agent, a sensible accept-language, and the supporting headers browsers actually send. Carry cookies through a session so the site sees continuity rather than a fresh stranger on every hit. And tie it all together with the one factor that quietly decides everything — IP quality. The cleanest technique in the world won't save a request from an address that's already flagged, because the challenge fires on contact.
That's the case for screening IPs before you use them. Our network runs every IP through a 4-layer filter — connectivity, fraud/abuse, latency, and ban detection — so you're scraping from clean residential proxies instead of inherited reputation problems. Want to vet IPs on your own terms first? See how to check if a proxy is clean. And because every blocked request still burns bandwidth, avoiding bans is also how you stretch your GB — relevant since our GB never expire.