rotating user-agents isn't enough anymore. sites fingerprint your TLS handshake, accept-language order, and viewport size too. if your UA says Chrome 120 on Windows but your TLS cipher list matches Python's requests library, you're getting blocked. rotate the whole browser profile or nothing #webscraping

Before building a scraper, check the site's sitemap.xml and robots.txt. Many sites list every page URL in their sitemap, which means you can skip crawling entirely. Just fetch the sitemap, parse the URL list, and request each page directly. Fastest path to full coverage with zero crawl logic #webscraping

most bot detection doesn't need javascript challenges. it just checks if your headers look like a real browser. mismatched user-agent and accept-encoding, missing accept-language, wrong referer — these are the tells. fix your headers before you reach for stealth browsers #webscraping