Browser AgentsActive

Puppeteer

Google's headless Chrome automation library commonly used for scraping.

Operated by Google

What is Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium. It's widely used for web scraping, automated testing, PDF generation, and screenshot capture. Puppeteer is one of the most popular browser automation tools.

Puppeteer-controlled browsers typically identify themselves with "HeadlessChrome" in the user-agent string, though sophisticated users can override this. Detection also relies on the navigator.webdriver flag and other browser environment signals.

While Puppeteer has many legitimate uses (testing, monitoring, PDF generation), it's also the tool of choice for large-scale web scraping operations. Switch detects Puppeteer through multiple signals beyond just the user-agent string.

User-Agent Strings

These are the known user-agent patterns used by Puppeteer. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.

HeadlessChrome
headlesschrome

robots.txt example:

User-agent: HeadlessChrome
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /

Detection on the Switch Network

165

Sessions detected

186

Total events

95%

Avg confidence

First detected: 2/10/2026 · Last seen: 3/17/2026

How to Manage Puppeteer

1

High detection confidence through HeadlessChrome UA and webdriver flags.

2

Use Switch Content Gate for aggressive Puppeteer-based scraping.

3

Some Puppeteer traffic is legitimate (monitoring, testing) — consider allowing known IPs.

4

Deploy behavioral analysis to catch stealth-mode Puppeteer.

How to block Puppeteer

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