Playwright
Microsoft's browser automation framework for testing and scraping.
What is Playwright?
Playwright is Microsoft's cross-browser automation library supporting Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. It's designed for end-to-end testing but is increasingly used for web scraping and AI agent infrastructure.
Unlike Puppeteer, Playwright doesn't add a distinctive user-agent string by default. Detection relies on the navigator.webdriver flag, automation-related browser properties, and behavioral analysis. Playwright can also run in headful mode, making it harder to detect.
Playwright's cross-browser support makes it a versatile tool for both legitimate testing and unauthorized scraping. Its growing popularity in the AI agent ecosystem (it's the default browser automation tool for many AI agent frameworks) makes it increasingly important to detect.
User-Agent Strings
These are the known user-agent patterns used by Playwright. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.
robots.txt example:
User-agent: Playwright Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
How to Manage Playwright
No distinctive UA string — relies on behavioral and environment detection.
Use Switch webdriver flag detection and automation global checks.
Growing use in AI agent frameworks makes detection increasingly important.
Content Gate (document.write) is effective against Playwright-based scrapers.
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