I Built 34 Web Scrapers — Here's What I Learned About Anti-Bot Detection

Over the past year, I've built 34 production web scrapers serving 300+ users with 4,200+ combined runs. Some of these scrapers have been running daily for months without breaking. Others? They died within a week. Here's everything I learned about keeping scrapers alive in 2026. Most Scrapers Break Within Weeks If you've built a scraper that worked perfectly on Monday and returned empty results by Friday, welcome to the club. The three killers: 1. Selector rot. Sites redesign, A/B test, or just shuffle class names. That div.product-card-v2__title\ you relied on? Gone. 2. Rate limiting. Hammer a site with 100 requests/second and you'll get blocked before your first dataset completes. Most developers underestimate how aggressive modern rate limiting is. 3. Anti-bot systems. Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX, reCAPTCHA — these aren't just CAPTCHAs anymore. They fingerprint your browser, analyze mouse movements, and flag headless Chrome in milliseconds. Why Crawlee + Puppeteer Is My Go-To St