Definition
An anti-bot stealth browser is a puppeteer-extra or playwright-extra setup with stealth plugins, a persistent warm Chrome profile, and a worker pool — used to scrape SERPs (Google, Bing) without paying for a sanctioned SERP API. Effective for personal/hobby projects; brittle for production where downtime is real cost.
In Depth
An r/mcp post in April 2026 launched a free anti-bot Google search MCP after benchmarking 6 broken alternatives. The recipe: puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth (mask automation fingerprint), persistent --user-data-dir (warm profile), 4-worker pool with auto-rebuild on detection, Mozilla Readability + Turndown for content extraction. The arms race against Google's anti-bot is one a small OSS maintainer almost always loses eventually. For production work the same role is filled by hosted SERP APIs (Scavio, Serper, SerpAPI, Brave Search API) where the vendor maintains parsers and absorbs the detection arms race. The decision rule: who pays if it breaks at 2am? If a customer pays, buy. If you pay, build is fine.
Example Usage
Hobby Claude Code agent uses anti-bot stealth browser MCP for free Google search. Works for 4-6 weeks until Google's detection updates; takes a day to patch. Same agent in production with paid customers uses Scavio MCP — never breaks the morning of launch.
Platforms
Anti-Bot Stealth Browser is relevant across the following platforms, all accessible through Scavio's unified API:
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