I get why it can look like we're “lying” to website operators, that’s a fair concern.
But stealth, as we see it, isn’t about deception for abuse. It’s about making automated access behave closer to how real users interact with the web, in an ecosystem where most anti-bot systems default to blocking everything that isn’t explicitly whitelisted.
Right now, the model is broken. Unless you have a direct partnership, you're often locked out, even for legitimate use cases like research, monitoring, or building user-facing tools on top of public data.
We’re not supporting harmful behavior (credential stuffing, DDoS, piracy, etc.). The goal is to enable responsible access to publicly available information without forcing every use case into closed-door agreements.
There’s also a real tradeoff happening. Increasingly aggressive anti-bot measures (like harder CAPTCHAs) degrade the experience for actual users, while not necessarily stopping sophisticated automation, robots solve CAPTCHAs better than humans.
So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” — it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms. Right now, that line is blurry, and we think there’s room for better balance.
Happy to engage on where that line should be drawn.
> So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” - it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms.
I think it's pretty simple: if a website clearly isn't welcoming automated access, like when they set up UA filters and such, it should not be automatically. Stealth browsers that bypasses those filters are abusing the site.
Why does web get a free pass?