Stop Web Scraping with Prosopo

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting data from websites. This is often attempted by bots that navigate pages and collect information at scale. While some scraping is harmless and even helpful (like for search engine indexing), many bots scrape data without permission, infringing on privacy and server resources.

Why is Scraping a Problem?

Unsanctioned scraping can lead to:

• Intellectual property theft
  • The current rush to AI is making this a hot topic, as many companies are scraping data to train their models.
• Server overload
• Competitive data mining
• User experience degradation

In particular, privacy-oriented platforms need protection from bots that bypass consent and harvest personal information.

Trends in 2026

Year on year, searches for scraping have exploded, driven by interest in AI and data mining. Many website owners and content producers are concerned about the implications of unsanctioned scraping on their business models and user privacy. People want to protect their data to ensure it is not used without consent.

How Prosopo Protects Against Scraping

Prosopo distinguishes legitimate visitors, search crawlers and authorised AI agents from scraping infrastructure on every request — policy-driven, not all-or-nothing:

• How the visitor behaves. Mouse movement, scroll rhythm and typing cadence. Automation repeats itself in ways a person does not, and that holds even when every other detail about the session looks ordinary.
• Where the traffic really comes from. Attackers route through home broadband connections and racks of real phones so each request looks like a separate ordinary visitor. Bot protection recognises those networks even when the individual address has no history.
• Sudden surges from the wrong places. A normal day sees steady traffic from your usual markets. A coordinated burst from hosting networks or unfamiliar regions gets extra checks, without slowing anyone else down.
• Detection that moves during the attack. When an operator changes tactics mid-attack, the platform adjusts while it is still happening rather than in a write-up afterwards.
• Agent-aware policy. Trusted crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) and authorised AI agents stay welcome; unauthorised automation is sent through a CAPTCHA challenge-response or blocked outright. Access Control rules let you encode the policy per endpoint without code changes.

Real visitors and trusted agents get through invisibly; scraping infrastructure is blocked before it reaches your origin.

What it looks like in production

A subscription search product had its free tier consumed at scale by a competitor reselling the results. Over thirty days: 7,824,429 sessions scored, 315,766 stopped as automated, and 79% of real visitors cleared without seeing a puzzle. The scraper was running slowly from home broadband addresses, so nothing about its rate stood out. What caught it was the client contradicting itself. Full figures in the scraped SaaS case study.

What to use

• Access Control — block hosting ASNs, TLS fingerprints and user agents associated with scraping toolchains.
• Enterprise (Prosopo Protect) — put bot-aware verification in front of catalogue, search and content APIs.
• Bot Protection — surface a 0–1 score per request so your backend can rate-limit or throttle suspicious patterns.