Questions · Discover
Does allowlisting an agent expose me to scrapers?
Allowlisting a named user agent from a published, static set of addresses is narrow by construction. A scraper can copy a user agent string, but it cannot originate from addresses it does not control, which is why the address list is the part that matters.
Why it happens
Bot management assigns a score to the request before your theme is involved. An agent driving a headless browser from a data centre address looks, on every one of those signals, like the scraping traffic the product was bought to stop. The challenge that follows expects a human interaction the agent cannot perform.
The loss is invisible in analytics, and that is the property that makes this stall dangerous. A request that is challenged before the page loads produces no session, no pageview and no add to cart, so it never appears in your conversion rate. It appears as an absence.
This comes up at the Discover stage. The full treatment, including how to reproduce it and what to change, is on Bot protection blocks the agent before the storefront loads.
Related questions
Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.