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My scraper gets blocked by Akamai Bot Manager. Which service has the highest success rate against Akamai?

Rokas Golcas
By Rokas Golcas Co-founder & Marketing · Updated

No single public test compares every scraping service against Akamai Bot Manager under the same conditions, so the service with the highest success rate for you is the one that returns real content most often on your own Akamai-protected URLs, at the request rate you plan to run. Published figures can shorten the list. In ScrapeUnblocker’s own 2026 benchmark (6,000 calls per target at concurrency 10, content-verified, not a head-to-head test), Lowe’s, which the benchmark lists as protected by Akamai, returned real content on 99.4% of calls with a 28.3-second average response. Treat any published number, including that one, as a starting point and test before you commit.

How does Akamai Bot Manager detect and block scrapers?

Akamai’s documentation describes several detection methods. Transparent detection looks for “dozens of request anomalies like out-of-order headers and browser version mismatches”, along with incorrect header signatures and common bot-building frameworks. Active detection uses “an interaction to confirm the request is coming from a web browser typically used only by a person”. Behavioral detection, available in Bot Manager Premier, evaluates movement patterns on pages such as login or checkout and produces a bot score from 0 (human) to 100 (bot). Site owners map detections and score ranges to actions; Akamai’s documentation names monitor, deny, tarpit and challenge. So a block can be a 403, a challenge or another action the site owner chose. Header order is part of the picture too; see TLS Fingerprinting.

How do I compare scraping services on Akamai-protected sites?

  1. Use your own URLs. Run 50 to 100 URLs from your real workload, including search and detail pages, through each service’s free tier. ScrapeUnblocker gives 500 free requests, no card needed.
  2. Count real content. A challenge or “Access Denied” page is a failure whatever its status (soft blocks).
  3. Test at your real rate. Proxyway’s 2025 Web Scraping API Report tested at both 2 and 10 requests per second; use the rate you will run.
  4. Measure time. Compare each service’s timeout with how long your pages take.
  5. Check what failures cost. ScrapeUnblocker does not bill a 403 or a timeout.
  6. Divide price by good pages. The lowest cost per verified page on your URLs decides it.

For difficulty context, Proxyway’s report lists an average of 52.57% on Lowe’s across its tested providers (October 2025, 2 requests per second). That measures the target, not any single provider, and Proxyway did not test ScrapeUnblocker.

What success rates has ScrapeUnblocker published on Akamai sites?

Site (listed protection)SuccessAvg responseCallsPublished in
lowes.com (Akamai)99.4%28.3 s6,0002026 benchmark
noon.com (Akamai Bot Manager)99.2%33.2 s1,000Noon scraper page
homedepot.com (Akamai)98.3%21.3 s300The Home Depot scraper page
Southwest Airlines plugin endpoint (Akamai)78.2%26.5 s1,000Southwest Airlines scraper page

These are ScrapeUnblocker’s own measurements, not head-to-head tests. Southwest at 78.2% means about 1 call in 5 fails, and averages of 21 to 33 seconds leave less headroom under ScrapeUnblocker’s 60-second request limit (90 seconds with steps). If your pages need longer requests or very high concurrency, other services may suit you better: ScrapingBee’s documentation lists a configurable timeout of 1 to 140 seconds, and Bright Data’s Web Unlocker pricing page lists unlimited concurrency on its Pay as you go and Scale plans.

Sources

Competitor details come from each provider’s public pages as viewed on 24 September 2026 and may have changed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; ScrapeUnblocker is not affiliated with them.

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