Reach the sites that try to block you

Some sites fight back. You make a polite request, you even open it in a real browser, and you still get turned away with an error or one of those "prove you're human" walls. These sites watch for anything that looks automated and shut it out.

This is the last resort, and the one that costs a little money. A service routes your request so it looks like an ordinary person browsing from home, not a robot. The one I've used is Bright Data. The product category is called a web unlocker, built on what's known as a residential proxy. Save it for the stubborn few, because each request costs a cent or two and that adds up.

The whole point is restraint

You already have two cheaper tools that handle almost the entire web. This one exists for the handful of sites that beat both, and the discipline is to use it only on those.

The three steps up

Think of it as a ladder. You climb only as high as you have to, and most sites stop you on the first rung.

How it gets through

The reason you get blocked is that your requests look like they're coming from a data center, which is an easy tell. The service routes your request through a regular home internet connection and makes it look like a normal browser. To the website, it's just another visitor. Some versions even handle the "prove you're human" walls for you.

Keep the cost from running away

The trap is letting your whole job run through the paid service by habit. At a cent or two each, that gets expensive fast. The fix is to wire it as a backup, not the default: try free, try the browser, and only fall back to the paid route on the specific pages that actually got blocked. If a lot of pages are falling to step three, something earlier is off.

And stay on the right side of it. This lets you read public pages a site tried to wall off from robots. It doesn't make it okay to ignore a clear "no," grab people's personal information, or pound a server. Read what's public, go slow, and don't be the reason a site tightens its rules.