Verify a Block Manually
Replay a real human browsing session through your Residential Proxy to determine whether a block comes from the target website's defenses or from the proxy itself.
When a scraper suddenly starts getting blocked, the proxy is the easiest thing to blame. But in most cases the target website has tightened its bot detection, and the same IPs still work fine for ordinary browsing.
This guide walks through a manual test: browse the target website through your Residential Proxy in a real browser, exactly the way a human would. The result tells you which side the block is actually coming from.
When to use this
Use this test when your scraper worked before and started failing, or when a scrape is blocked but you're not sure whether the proxy IPs or the website is responsible. If you haven't run the automated check yet, start with Troubleshoot URL Access first, it's faster.
Why direct URL access fails
Many websites treat a request for a deep page (a product page, a listing, a search result) with no prior history as a strong bot signal. A real visitor almost never lands there cold. They arrive from a search engine, from the homepage, or from a category page, carrying cookies, a referrer, and a browsing history that the site has already seen.
That's why a scraper hitting a product URL directly can be blocked while the exact same IP loads the site normally in a browser. The test below reproduces the natural path so you can compare the two.
What you need
- Your Residential Proxy credentials from the Proxy Setup tab. See the Authentication guide for the username format.
- Google Chrome with the FoxyProxy extension installed.
- Optional: CloakBrowser, an open source stealth browser, for the second round of testing.
Run the test
Route Chrome through the proxy
Open FoxyProxy, add a new proxy, and fill in the connection details:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Proxy type | HTTP |
| Hostname / IP | proxy.mrscraper.com |
| Port | 10000 |
| Username | Your proxy username, for example user-country-us |
| Password | Your proxy password |
Set the country in the username to match the target website's audience. For a Brazilian website, use -country-br.
Save the proxy, then enable it from the FoxyProxy toolbar icon. Confirm the traffic is actually routed by opening api.ipify.org and checking that the IP is not your own.
Search for the website on Google
Go to google.com and search for the target website's name or homepage, for example ifood.com.br.
Don't paste the target page URL into the address bar. The point of this test is to arrive at the site the way a visitor does.
Click through from the search results
Click the organic search result that leads to the website's homepage. This gives the session a search engine referrer and lets the site set its cookies on a page it expects first-time visitors to land on.
Navigate to the target page like a human
From the homepage, reach the page you want to scrape using the site's own navigation: menus, category links, the on-site search box, pagination. Take a moment between clicks instead of firing them back to back.
If you reach the page and it loads normally, the website is serving your proxy IP without complaint.
If regular Chrome is blocked, retry with CloakBrowser
Regular Chrome still exposes automation and environment signals that stricter sites fingerprint. CloakBrowser is an open source stealth browser built on a patched Chromium that hides far more of them.
Launch it in headed mode with the same proxy credentials, then repeat steps 2 to 4 inside it:
import { launch } from 'cloakbrowser';
const browser = await launch({
headless: false,
proxy: {
server: 'http://proxy.mrscraper.com:10000',
username: 'user-country-br',
password: 'pass123'
}
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://www.google.com');
// Now search for the site and click through by hand.Interpret the results
| Manual browser test | What it means | Next action |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ Works in regular Chrome | The proxy IPs are fine. Your scraper is being detected by its request signature or by navigating directly to the target URL. | Reproduce the natural flow in your scraper: start from the homepage or a search result, keep cookies across requests, and enable browser rendering. |
| ❌ Blocked in Chrome, ✅ works in CloakBrowser | The IPs are fine. The website is fingerprinting the browser, not the IP. | Move your scraping to a stealth browser. See the CloakBrowser examples. |
| ❌ Blocked in both, even with natural navigation | The website is rejecting the IP itself, or the whole country or ASN. | Try a different proxy country and repeat the test. If it still fails, contact support. |
| ❌ Blocked in both, and the site is also blocked without the proxy | The website is blocking your region or is down for everyone. | Verify from a different network before investigating the proxy further. |
A block is not always about IP quality
A website that recently changed its protection can block a perfectly healthy residential IP simply because the request didn't look like a human session. Running this test before escalating saves you from swapping proxies that were never the problem.