Why Base Playwright Isn’t Enough to Bypass Akamai

Playwright’s strength lies in its ability to control headless browsers like Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, rendering dynamic content seamlessly. Yet, when scraping Akamai-protected sites, it encounters roadblocks due to Akamai’s multi-layered detection techniques:

• Browser Fingerprinting: Akamai checks properties like navigator.webdriver (set to true in headless mode) to identify automation tools.
• IP Analysis: It flags data center IPs or those with suspicious activity patterns.
• Behavioral Checks: It monitors mouse movements, click patterns, and navigation sequences to distinguish bots from humans.
  To illustrate, let’s try scraping an Akamai-protected site like Zalando using base Playwright:
  
  Best Methods to Bypass Akamai With Playwright
  To overcome Akamai’s defenses, we’ll detail three methods: using Scrapeless (the recommended approach), the Playwright Stealth plugin, and premium proxies. Each method includes detailed steps, code, and graphic descriptions.

Method 1: Use Scrapeless to Bypass Akamai(Recommended)

Scrapeless is a web scraping API tailored to defeat anti-bot systems like Akamai. It generates critical tokens (e.g., _abck and bm_sz cookies, sensor data) and manages proxies, ensuring high success rates with minimal effort. By integrating Scrapeless with Playwright, you can bypass Akamai’s checks effectively.

Why Scrapeless Excels

Token Generation: Provides Akamai-specific cookies and sensor data to pass initial verification.
Proxy Rotation: Uses premium proxies to mask your IP and avoid blocks.
Ease of Use: Handles complex bypassing logic, reducing manual configuration.
Step-by-Step Guide

Sign Up and Get API Key

Register at Scrapeless and retrieve your API key from the dashboard.

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Generate Akamai Cookies

Use the Scrapeless /api/v1/unlocker/request endpoint (Web Unlocker: Akamaiweb Cookie) to fetch _abck and bm_sz cookies.
Code:

   import json

   conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection("api.scrapeless.com")
   payload = json.dumps({
   "actor": "unlocker.akamaiweb",
   "input": {
       "type": "cookie",
       "url": "https://www.zalando.fr/release-calendar/homme-sneakers/",
       "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",

   },
   "proxy": {
       "country": "FR"
   }
   })
   headers = {
   'Content-Type': 'application/json',
   'x-api-token': 'YOUR API KEY'
   }
   conn.request("POST", "/api/v1/unlocker/request", payload, headers)
   res = conn.getresponse()
   data = res.read()
   print(data.decode("utf-8"))

Set Cookies in Playwright: Not Recommended
While injecting cookies into Playwright is technically possible, it's generally not the best approach for bypassing Akamai protections. Automated browsers like Playwright have numerous "fingerprints" that make them easily detectable, even with valid cookies.

Why it's problematic:

Modern websites easily detect automated browsers through JavaScript fingerprinting
Akamai cookies often have additional properties tied to the original browser
The way Playwright executes JavaScript differs from a normal browser
Recommended alternative:

Use a simple HTTP request with appropriate cookies and headers
Code for HTTP request:

headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
    "Sec-Fetch-Dest": "document"
}

cookies = {
    "_abck": "0E868C6CC7CA82A40139ACBF093E8CDE~-1~YAAQyIMQAoFI7L2VAQAA4tUo6Q1z...",
    "bm_sz": "BF4B4DAA3C6506FF52A615374EA95300~YAAQyIMQAj5B7L2VAQAA474o6Rv..."
}

response = requests.get("https://www.zalando.com", headers=headers, cookies=cookies)
content = response.text

Handle Sensor Data (If Needed)

For sites requiring sensor data, use the "Akamaiweb Sensor" endpoint and inject it via Playwright.
Refer to Scrapeless Documentation for specifics.
Advantages
Scrapeless simplifies bypassing Akamai by automating token generation and proxy management, offering a 90%+ success rate based on its optimized infrastructure.

Method 2: Use the Playwright Stealth Plugin to Bypass Akamai

The Playwright Stealth plugin modifies Playwright to evade basic detection by altering browser fingerprints (e.g., hiding navigator.webdriver).

The steps to use the Playwright Stealth Plugin to Bypass Akamai are as follows:

Install the Plugin
Run: pip install playwright-stealth
Apply Stealth to Playwright
Code: