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