Skip to content
Clearcote Labs · Research

Research & deep-dives

How bot detection actually works, what makes a browser identifiable, and how we build against it — written up in the open, vendor-neutral, and reproducible.

Hover · drag · click a term

Every research article and Q&A term, connected. Also on the Q&A hub.

FeaturedDesign principles

Coherence over camouflage: why a plausible identity beats a hidden one

Most stealth tooling tries to hide. The signals that survive scrutiny don't hide — they agree with each other.

6 min readRead

All articles

Fingerprinting

Spec invariants as lie detectors

Many web APIs are not free-form — the spec or the engine constrains their values, so a reading can be convicted by the API's own rules, with no baseline and no population data.

7 min
Detection teardowns

Identifying the engine behind the User-Agent

A User-Agent is a claim. The JavaScript engine underneath answers independently — and it cannot easily be made to lie.

8 min
Fingerprinting

Cross-realm coherence: why a worker must agree with the page

A page is not one JavaScript realm but several — and the values they report about the same machine have to match.

7 min
Benchmarks

How browser stealth is measured: coherence, entropy, and headless tells

What consistency testers, entropy tools, and headless benchmarks actually measure — and why a 'unique' fingerprint and a 'detectable' one are different problems.

9 min
Engineering

Patches, not black boxes: how a stealth browser is built and verified

How an anti-detect Chromium is assembled from readable patches, built reproducibly, and verified end-to-end — so you can trust the binary matches the source.

9 min
Detection teardowns

How automation gets caught, layer by layer

From the WebDriver flag to the TLS handshake — the distinct layers a detector reads, and why fixing one rarely helps.

10 min
Fingerprinting

Anatomy of a browser fingerprint: every signal, and why they must agree

A field guide to the signals that make a browser identifiable — grouped by where they come from and how they betray a spoof.

8 min
Design principles

Coherence over camouflage: why a plausible identity beats a hidden one

Most stealth tooling tries to hide. The signals that survive scrutiny don't hide — they agree with each other.

6 min

Looking for shorter, direct answers? Browse the Q&A.