Web Scraping22 min read
User-Agent and Headers
Understand HTTP headers, especially User-Agent, and why many sites block requests without them.
David Miller
December 7, 2025
2.6k76
Websites inspect headers to decide who you are.
If no User-Agent:
They think you are a bot.
What is User-Agent
It tells:
- browser
- OS
- device
Example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)...
Always send headers
headers = {
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"
}
res = requests.get("https://example.com", headers=headers)
Request flow
flowchart LR
A[Scraper] -->|Headers| B[Server]
B --> C{Looks Real?}
C -->|Yes| D[Send Page]
C -->|No| E[Block]
Remember
- User-Agent is mandatory
- Mimic a real browser
#Python#Intermediate#HTTP