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Hacker News·4 min read·medium

Show HN: We beat Cloudflare's bot detection (open-source stealth browser)

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✦AI Summary

A developer has created an open-source stealth browser designed to bypass bot detection systems like Cloudflare. The tool addresses the issue of AI agents failing to distinguish between actual content and 'block pages' that return successful HTTP status codes.

Why it matters

This highlights a growing arms race between AI crawlers and website security, impacting the reliability of data collection for AI applications.

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As of July 1, 2025, Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default on every new domain, and it has since turned away hundreds of billions of bot requests. Most of the coverage was about the big fight, AI labs against publishers over training data. That wasn’t my problem.

My problem was an agent that kept coming back confidently wrong. It would read a source, check a price, fetch a page I asked for, and give me an answer that sounded right and wasn’t. It was reading the block page instead of the real page: Cloudflare’s “Just a moment” screen, summarized back in the same confident voice it uses for everything else.

Nothing in the response said the fetch had failed. So I measured how often it happens, and we built something to fix it.

The reason this is easy to miss is that nothing in the system thinks anything went wrong.

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