HeadlessChrome

Google Chrome running without a window, driven by a program: used for automated testing, taking screenshots of pages, and scraping.

Why? Many sites turn away programs that admit to being programs, so dressing up as a browser gets through. Renting servers in the cloud is cheap and each one comes with a fresh address; borrowing someone’s home connection costs more, but is the hardest to tell from a person. In August 2025 Cloudflare reported that an AI search company, once its named crawlers were blocked, carried on with an unnamed one that said it was Chrome on a Mac and kept changing its addresses (report).