The Ultimate Guide to Puppeteer Web Scraping in 2025

Introduction

Scraping in 2025 means dealing with JavaScript-heavy sites, client-side rendering, and anti-bot defenses. Old tools break often. Puppeteer still delivers for dynamic scraping, handling SPAs, lazy-loaded content, and full browser control. But scaling it locally hits limits fast: memory, CAPTCHAs, proxies. Browserless solves that with cloud-based Chrome, built-in stealth, session reuse, and CAPTCHA handling. This guide covers both local Puppeteer and scaling with Browserless.

Why Use Puppeteer for Web Scraping in 2025?

Puppeteer still holds its ground in 2025 because it is well-suited to the modern web. It lets you control a full browser, meaning it can handle JavaScript-heavy sites, SPAs, and dynamic interfaces without a sweat. If a site relies on client-side rendering or loads content on scroll or user input, Puppeteer can replicate those interactions and get to the content.

The API is solid and hasn’t lost momentum. You can script interactions, extract DOM data, block resources, capture screenshots, and control every part of the browsing session down to network requests. It’s the toolkit that fits into testing just as well as scraping, making it flexible for workflows that cross over between QA and data collection.

Developers also appreciate that Puppeteer plays well with DevTools. You get full access to Chrome’s debugging protocol, which lets you intercept requests, monitor performance, trace rendering steps, and fine-tune execution. When you're scraping a tricky site and need full control over what's rendered, in what order, and how the browser behaves, that level of access makes a big difference.

Getting Started with Puppeteer

If you’ve worked with Node before, getting Puppeteer into your stack is simple. It installs with a pinned version of Chromium that’s already configured to work well with the API. You just run:

npm install puppeteer

That gives you everything you need to launch a browser and run your first scrape. There’s nothing extra to compile, no binaries to fiddle with. If you want to use a custom version of Chrome instead of the bundled one, you can pass executablePath when launching the browser.

Once you’ve got it installed, the basic structure of a Puppeteer script is: start a browser, open a tab, go to a URL, and extract what you need. Here’s what that looks like:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  // Launch browser in headed mode (better for debugging anti-bot issues)
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });

  // Create a new tab in the browser
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // Navigate to a URL and wait until the DOM is ready
  await page.goto('https://example.com', { waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded' });

  // Log the page title so we know the navigation worked
  const title = await page.title();
  console.log('Page title:', title);

  await browser.close();
})();

That gives you full access to the page context. If you want to extract structured data, use page.evaluate() to run JavaScript directly in the page. You can select DOM elements and pull out values like in a browser console. Here's how you might extract product titles from a typical e-commerce layout:

const productTitles = await page.evaluate(() => {
  return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.product-title'))
    .map(el => el.textContent.trim());
});

console.log('Product Titles:', productTitles);

Inspect the target site in DevTools and find reliable selectors. Class names change constantly, and scraping against unstable selectors will break your scraper sooner rather than later. You can also use page.$$eval or page.locator() if you're working with more modern Playwright-style selectors or chaining interactions.

Working with Dynamic Pages

Modern sites don’t just give you HTML and call it a day they build the page in chunks, triggered by user behavior, scroll position, or client-side routing. When scraping this content, you can’t just goto() and expect everything to be there. You’ll need to wait for the right elements to appear or for the page’s network activity to quiet down. Here’s how you set that up with Puppeteer:

await page.goto('https://example.com', {
  waitUntil: 'networkidle0' // Wait until there are no more than 0 network connections for 500ms
});

That usually works when the page fetches everything upfront. But if you're targeting content that loads asynchronously, say, product reviews or comments, you’ll probably get better results waiting for specific DOM elements instead:

await page.waitForSelector('.product-review'); // Waits for a known element to appear

You'll need to script some user-like behavior for infinite scrolls and lazy loading. Many pages load content when you scroll to the bottom or pause in a specific spot. A loop that scrolls and waits is usually enough to trigger those requests. Here's a basic version of that:

let previousHeight;

while (true) {
  previousHeight = await page.evaluate('document.body.scrollHeight');
  await page.evaluate('window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)');
  await page.waitForTimeout(1500); // Wait for new items to load
  const currentHeight = await page.evaluate('document.body.scrollHeight');
  if (currentHeight === previousHeight) break; // Stop if nothing new was added
}

Once you've scrolled far enough, you can grab the rendered content with selectors you’ve tested in the browser. For example, if you were scraping YouTube search results, you might do something like:

const results = await page.evaluate(() =>
  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('ytd-video-renderer')).map(video => ({
    title: video.querySelector('#video-title')?.textContent?.trim(),
    channel: video.querySelector('#channel-info')?.textContent?.trim(),
  }))
);

Dynamic content scrapes usually fail when the selector loads late or gets renamed. One thing that helps is building in retries or fallback selectors. Another is watching for timeouts and logging them so you can patch edge cases later. Puppeteer gives you enough control to stay flexible without getting boxed in. You just need to test your waits and DOM checks closely. Avoid hardcoded delays, and aim to sync your scrape with something on the page that matters.

How to Avoid Detection with Puppeteer

Headless Chrome is a dead giveaway if you run it without masking. Sites don’t just look at your user-agent string; they dig into browser properties, canvas rendering, WebGL fingerprints, and subtle behavioral quirks. A regular puppeteer.launch({ headless: true }) setup won’t hold up long against detection. You might load a page once or twice, but it doesn’t take much for the server to flag you as a bot.

The most common flag is navigator.webdriver. When it’s set to true, you're announcing you're running in automation. Many sites also look for missing plugins, flat window dimensions, uniform screen resolution, or the absence of language headers. These signals don’t exist in isolation; they’re evaluated as a group, and if they don’t match what real users show, you get challenged.

To work around this, start with puppeteer-extra and the stealth plugin. It patches many of these signals, automatically modifies the navigator, fakes plugins, injects WebGL noise, and adjusts languages. Here’s how you set that up:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const StealthPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth');

puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin());

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false, // headless=true is more detectable on some sites
    args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled']
  });

  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // Set a more realistic user-agent
  await page.setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36');

  // Randomize viewport to avoid fingerprinting
  await page.setViewport({
    width: 1280 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
    height: 800 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100),
    deviceScaleFactor: 1,
    isMobile: false,
    hasTouch: false
  });

  await page.goto('https://example.com', { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' });

  await page.screenshot({ path: 'undetectable-test.png', fullPage: true });

  await browser.close();
})();

If you're working across multiple pages or domains, rotate the user-agent per session and persist cookies to simulate returning visits. Avoid launching a fresh page every time bots usually reset everything. Humans don’t. You don’t need to spoof everything perfectly, but enough variation to avoid sticking out in logs. Treat headless mode as a starting point, not a final setup. The closer you get to typical usage patterns, the fewer CAPTCHAs and blocks you'll hit.

Scraping at Scale with Browserless

Running Puppeteer locally is great for quick tests and smaller scraping jobs, but scaling beyond a few pages gets messy fast. You start hitting CPU and memory ceilings, and suddenly you’re juggling multiple browser instances, zombie processes, and proxy bans. The biggest issue? You're forced to manage infrastructure while also trying to build the logic that scrapes and extracts.

Once you push past a few dozen concurrent sessions, headless Chrome becomes a bottleneck. It's heavy on RAM, and Puppeteer doesn’t gracefully handle flaky proxy failures, unexpected page states, or CAPTCHA walls at scale. You usually get a bunch of half-finished runs, high failure rates, and lots of cleanup logic. This is where Browserless steps in: It offloads all the browser orchestration to a managed, cloud-native platform.

Browserless gives you three main ways to run Puppeteer in the cloud: direct Puppeteer connection, REST API calls, or using BQL (Browserless Query Language). Here’s how to run a scraper against example.com using BQL to handle session boot, proxy setup, and CAPTCHA bypass  all in one query:

mutation ScrapeExample {
  reject(type: [image, stylesheet, font]) {
    enabled
  }

  solve(type: cloudflare) {
    found
    solved
    time
  }

  goto(url: "https://example.com", waitUntil: networkIdle) {
    status
    time
  }

  evaluate(content: "document.title") {
    value
  }
}

Want to hook this into your own Puppeteer workflow? You can call the same workflow via HTTP and retrieve a browserWSEndpoint to connect to the running instance:

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

const token = 'YOUR_BROWSERLESS_TOKEN';
const endpoint = 'https://chrome.browserless.io';
const targetURL = 'https://example.com';

const connectToBrowserless = async () => {
  const res = await fetch(`${endpoint}/playwright?token=${token}`, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      query: `
        mutation Reconnect {
          goto(url: "${targetURL}", waitUntil: networkIdle) {
            status
          }
          reconnect(timeout: 30000) {
            browserWSEndpoint
          }
        }
      `
    })
  });

  const { data } = await res.json();
  return data.reconnect.browserWSEndpoint;
};

(async () => {
  const wsEndpoint = await connectToBrowserless();
  const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: wsEndpoint });
  const page = (await browser.pages())[0];

  const content = await page.evaluate(() => document.title);
  console.log('Page title:', content);

  await browser.close();
})();

You don’t have to babysit browser processes or scale your Docker containers. Browserless handles retries, logs, metrics, proxy rotation, session reuse, and CAPTCHA solving in a single pipeline. Whether you're scraping one page or ten thousand, the load stays consistent and your time stays focused on the logic, not the infrastructure.

Best Practices for Scalable Puppeteer Scraping

Running everything on your local machine works for quick tests, but it doesn’t take long before things start falling apart. Crashes, memory spikes, and rate limits show up fast once you start scaling. Offloading browser sessions to a cloud service like Browserless saves you the headache. You don’t have to worry about juggling processes or managing IPs. You get what you need, on demand.

Rotating sessions and user agents make a noticeable difference in how long your scrapers stay undetected. I like rotating user-agent strings per session and storing cookies to make returning sessions look more natural. Here’s how you can wire that up in your script:

const userAgents = [
  'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)...',
  'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7)...',
];

const context = await browser.newContext({
  userAgent: userAgents[Math.floor(Math.random() * userAgents.length)],
  viewport: { width: 1280, height: 800 }, // Keep this realistic too
});

Many sites load fonts, images, and scripts that aren’t useful for scraping. That’s wasted bandwidth and it sometimes triggers tracking scripts. I usually block those before they even hit the browser. Here’s how to skip them:

await page.route('**/*', route => {
  const skip = ['image', 'stylesheet', 'font', 'media'];
  if (skip.includes(route.request().resourceType())) {
    return route.abort(); // Don't load it
  }
  route.continue(); // Let everything else through
});

Sites change all the time. You might be scraping successfully one day, then pulling empty arrays the next. It helps to log the selectors you rely on and check whether the HTML shape shifts. You can compare DOM snapshots, monitor for drop-offs in results, or even hash the content and watch for changes. It’s not flashy, but catching structure changes early will save you hours of debugging later.

Conclusion

Puppeteer is still one of the most reliable tools for scraping dynamic, JavaScript-heavy sites. You get full browser control, a mature API, and the ability to automate anything from page clicks to complex interactions. That said, local scraping breaks down fast when you start scaling. Browserless gives you the infrastructure to go beyond your laptop: run hundreds of sessions in parallel, rotate proxies, solve CAPTCHAs, and keep your jobs stable. If you want to move faster without dealing with memory leaks, headless quirks, or bans, try Browserless for free and get scraping at scale.

FAQs

Can Puppeteer scrape data from single-page applications (SPAs)?
Yes. Puppeteer works well with SPAs since it runs a full browser and can wait for JavaScript to render content before extracting data. You can target dynamic elements once they’re available in the DOM.

How do you handle XHR and fetch requests in Puppeteer scraping?
Puppeteer gives you access to network activity to intercept, block, or monitor XHR/fetch requests. This is useful for scraping JSON responses directly instead of parsing rendered HTML.

How can I reduce Puppeteer memory usage in large scraping jobs?
Use browser.newContext() instead of newPage() for better isolation, clean up pages after each task, and avoid running too many concurrent sessions locally. Offloading to a service like Browserless helps scale without memory leaks or crashes.

What’s the best way to rotate proxies and user-agents in Puppeteer?
You can launch a new browser instance with a proxy by passing the proxy-server as a launch argument. For user-agent rotation, set it manually per page with page.setUserAgent(). Services like Browserless simplify this with built-in proxy rotation.

Is Puppeteer detectable by anti-bot systems like Cloudflare in 2025?
Yes default headless Chromium can still be detected. To reduce detection, use puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth, avoid headless mode when possible, randomize fingerprints, and manage cookies like a real session. For tougher challenges, Browserless supports CAPTCHA solving and stealth out of the box.