We detected no managed anti-bot vendor on theonion.com’s homepage. That does not mean the whole site is open: deep pages frequently flip to bot-managed, so check the exact URL you intend to scrape.
A plain HTTP client reaches it — no managed anti-bot detected.
Typical access
Plain HTTP
Homepage-level, datacenter-IP snapshot, June 13, 2026.
This is a homepage-level snapshot and can be inaccurate or out of date — anti-bot vendors update their models continuously, deep pages are usually more protected than the homepage, and difficulty is IP-sensitive: a site can read differently from a clean vs a flagged IP and even flip over time. Treat it as a directional signal, not a guarantee.
The homepage is the open front door. On a entertainment site the valuable pages behave differently — here's the plan to characterise theonion.com before you build.
Video / watch page
bot-managedJS-heavy and behaviorally bot-managed.
Channel / profile
JS renderJS-rendered; data in hidden scripts.
Search
bot-managedBot-managed and often auth-nudged.
Find a real deep URL cheaply from the site’s robots.txt and sitemap.xml, then run each through the anti-bot checker. This is an advisory based on the category and theonion.com’s homepage result — detect the wall, never try to pass a login.