I’m sorry but you comment shows you never had to fight this problem a scale. The challenge is not small time crawlers, the challenge is blocking large / dedicated actors. The problem is simple : if there is more than X volume of traffic per <aggregation criteria >, block it. Problem : most aggregation criteria are trivially spoofable, or very cheap to change : - IP : with IPv6 this is not an issue to rotate your IP often - UA : changing this is scraping 101 - SSL fingerprint : easy to use the same as everyone - IP stack fingerprint : also easy to use a common one - request / session tokens : it’s cheap to create a new session You can force login, but then you have a spam account creation challenge, with the same issues as above, and depending on your infra this can become heavy

Add to this that the minute you use a signal for detection, you “burn” it as adversaries will avoid using it, and you lose measurement thus the ability to know if you are fixing the problem at all.

I worked on this kind of problem for a FAANG service, whoever claims it’s easy clearly never had to deal with motivated adversaries