How Sites Detect Headless Browsers (And How to...

Websites can detect headless browsers through dozens of signals. Most scraper tutorials show you how to launch Playwright — none explain why it still gets blocked. Here's what sites are actually checking and how to evade each signal. How headless detection works Detection is probabilistic, not binary. Sites like Cloudflare, Akamai, and DataDome maintain a "bot score" based on many signals. Each anomaly adds to your score. Enough anomalies = block. The most common signals: navigator.webdriver = t