I’m building a web scraper and want to make sure I follow robots.txt rules properly. When I looked into this with headless browsers, I found out they don’t automatically check robots.txt files. The PhantomJS team told me that since it’s a browser and not a crawler, my script needs to handle robots.txt checking itself.
This got me wondering about the right approach. Do I need to verify robots.txt compliance for every single HTTP request my headless browser makes? Or is it enough to just validate the main page URL against robots.txt?
I’m not sure if robots.txt rules should apply to all resources the browser loads or just the primary URLs I’m targeting. What’s the proper way to handle this?
From my experience with enterprise scraping, it’s not as straightforward as it seems. Robots.txt was built for traditional crawlers, not headless browsers that act like real users. The key difference is intent - if you’re scraping public content that regular users would see, following robots.txt is more about being respectful than following strict rules. I’ve found that many sites actually expect some automated access and their robots.txt shows it. The real problem happens when your scraping looks nothing like human browsing. I check primary URLs against robots.txt but also use proper delays and rotate user agents. This works well across different projects without getting blocked. Most important thing: robots.txt is a guideline, not a legal requirement. Focus on scraping responsibly instead of getting caught up in technical compliance details.
you’re good just checking main URLs against robots.txt. checking every single resource is overkill - most sites only care about protecting their main content. keep it simple unless you’re crawling massive amounts of pages.
I’ve hit this same issue on multiple scraping projects. It really depends on how hard you’re hitting the sites and which ones you’re targeting. For light scraping - just a few pages here and there - checking the main URLs works fine. But if you’re running heavy automation or scraping sites that specifically call out resource protection in their robots.txt, you need to validate everything.
Here’s what I do: check robots.txt for your primary scraping URLs, but also respect obvious patterns like /api/ or /admin/ that are usually blocked. Most sites structure their robots.txt around content sections, not individual resources like images or CSS. Bottom line - keep your request frequency reasonable no matter what robots.txt says.