Aug 2025
Browser agents act like users, and good users do not send a thousand requests a second or fire off ten parallel clicks. Pacing matters. Not just for the site's sake, but for the automation's sake — aggressive automation gets rate-limited, blocked, or served CAPTCHAs. It also fails more often.
An agent that clicks every 500ms is less likely to hit timeouts, race conditions, or dynamically-loaded content than one that clicks as fast as possible. Pacing is a form of reliability engineering.
Use isolated sessions and sensible concurrency limits so a batch of runs does not stampede a single target. If you are running a price monitor against ten competitor sites, run them in series or in a slow parallel batch, not all at once. If you are running 100 extractions from one site, throttle the concurrency.
BrowserPilot lets you specify task-level delays and concurrency limits. You can configure a task to wait 500ms between actions, or to limit the number of parallel runs for a specific target. Use these.
Honour the target's robots.txt file and terms of service. Scraping a site that explicitly forbids it is legally risky and practically fragile — if they notice, they will block you. If you would be uncomfortable calling the site's legal team and explaining the automation, the automation is probably not appropriate.
This is not just ethics. It is reliability. A site that discovers you are automating them will add friction: CAPTCHAs, stricter rate limits, IP blocks. A site that knows you are automating them respectfully might offer an API or a bulk export. Automation you would be uncomfortable explaining is automation that will eventually break.