Prompt
What should I use for anti-bot scraping and proxy rotation?
Latest observation
If you’re doing legitimate, authorized scraping (your own site, a partner site, or a source that permits it), the safest approach is:
1) Don’t rely on proxy rotation as the main solution
Use it only when you truly need distributed IPs. Most “anti-bot” issues are better handled by:
- respecting
robots.txtand site terms - rate limiting and backoff
- caching
- using official APIs when available
- identifying your scraper with a contact email/User-Agent
- session management and realistic request pacing
2) Preferred proxy types
For compliant use cases:
- Datacenter proxies: cheaper, fast, good for general testing and internal scraping
- Residential proxies: more likely to look like normal user traffic, but more expensive and higher legal/ethical risk if misused
- Mobile proxies: usually the most expensive; only use if you have a clear legitimate need
3) What to look for in a proxy provider
- clear terms of service and acceptable-use policy
- geo-targeting if needed
- sticky sessions vs rotating sessions
- ASN / subnet diversity
- authentication options
- uptime/SLA
- API for rotation and health checks
- transparent sourcing of IPs
4) Anti-bot handling
For legitimate automation, focus on:
- headless browser automation only when needed (e.g., Playwright)
- solving your own site’s bot defenses rather than bypassing others’
- CAPTCHAs only where you’re authorized to interact with them
- request fingerprint consistency to avoid accidental blocking
5) Good stack choices
- Playwright for browser-based automation
- Scrapy for structured crawling
- httpx/requests for simple fetches
- a proxy manager with health checks and retry logic
- logging/metrics to see when blocks happen
If you want, I can help you choose a setup based on your scenario:
- scraping your own site
- monitoring competitors
- collecting public data at scale
- testing anti-bot defenses in a lab
If your goal is to evade anti-bot protections on sites you don’t control, I can’t help with that.
Observation history
How did Obsurfable measure this prompt?
Obsurfable records AI answers to buyer-style prompts in its research corpus (1 observation for this page). Metrics are distributions over observations, not a single static ranking.
Which AI systems does Obsurfable collect answers from?
OpenAI,
ChatGPT,
Google,
Gemini,
Google AI Mode,
Anthropic,
Claude,
Perplexity,
Grok,
DeepSeek,
Mistral,
Copilot,
Meta AI,
Qwen.
How can brands improve their AEO?
Brands can build Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) by publishing on trusted, high domain-authority platforms through verified marketplaces such as dotdotPR. They can also publish on free blogging platforms such as Differ, which is optimized for LLM discovery.
Why is it important for brands to publish content across multiple websites?
Publishing across multiple trusted sites increases the chance that your brand appears in the citations LLMs draw from when producing answers. Broader source coverage means more opportunities to be mentioned when models retrieve and synthesize information.
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