Can You Hide Your Selenium or Puppeteer Bot? See Why Websites Detect Them

Many people think using Selenium or Puppeteer (Pyppeteer) to simulate a browser can avoid detection, but browsers launched by these tools expose dozens of detectable features via JavaScript.

To illustrate, open https://bot.sannysoft.com/ in a normal browser and observe the green page.

Then launch Chrome in headed mode with Selenium and open the same page. The WebDriver entry is highlighted in red, indicating detection, and many other features are also flagged.

In headless mode the same detection occurs. Example code:

from selenium.webdriver import Chrome
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")

driver = Chrome('./chromedriver', options=chrome_options)
driver.get('https://bot.sannysoft.com/')
driver.save_screenshot('screenshot.png')

The resulting screenshot shows the detection markers.

Using Pyppeteer yields similar results. The headless Pyppeteer screenshot looks like this:

Thus, relying on Selenium or Puppeteer for scraping sites with strong security teams is risky, as detection is straightforward.