Competitive defense
Competitors are scraping your pricing. In real time.
Scrapers extract your prices and inventory continuously, feeding competitors' repricing engines within hours. Centinel detects and blocks them at the edge.
24/7
continuous scraping by competitors
Hours
from scrape to price undercut
1,600+
crawler fingerprints in our database
How Centinel solves this
Detect
Identify which crawlers are accessing your content, how often, and what they're targeting.
Decide
Block, allow, challenge, or monetize each crawler individually from your dashboard.
Protect
Edge-level enforcement in under 2ms. Real users pass through untouched.
Frequently asked questions
- How do competitors scrape pricing today?
- Most price-monitoring operations run on residential proxy networks with patched headless Chromium. curl-impersonate and similar tools reproduce real browser TLS handshakes, so IP reputation and user-agent checks miss them. Alpenglow Outfitters, a DACH retailer, found 847 distinct scraping signatures hitting their product pages before deploying Centinel.
- Can Centinel tell a competitor's scraper from a legitimate price aggregator?
- Yes. Centinel's database separates verified price aggregators (Google Shopping, Trivago, Skyscanner where licensed) from adversarial scrapers on an explicit allowlist. You keep the aggregators your commercial team signed with and block the rest. The classification runs per-crawler, not per-IP, so residential proxy rotation does not defeat the separation.
- Will my prices actually stay competitive if scrapers cannot see them?
- Yes, and Alpenglow's data shows the mechanism. Their promotional prices used to get undercut within hours of every update. After Centinel, scraping volume on product pages dropped 96%, campaigns held their intended duration, and conversion rose 3.4% over the following month. The lever is time: your pricing advantage lasts as long as the scrapers cannot observe it in real time.
- What about scrapers that rotate IPs constantly?
- IP rotation does not defeat fingerprint-based detection. Centinel matches on TLS handshake signatures, HTTP/2 frame patterns, and behavioral timing — signals that stay consistent across IPs because they are properties of the scraper software, not the network path. A curl-impersonate operation looks the same from a hundred residential IPs as it does from one.
- Can I monetize competitive scraping instead of blocking it?
- Technically yes, commercially rare. Most competitive scraping operations will not pay per-request fees, so the realistic outcome is blocking. Where monetization applies: legitimate aggregators, research firms, and comparison sites that want bulk access and have a budget for it. Centinel's licensing layer handles both paths through the same dashboard.
Pick the next step that fits where you are
Demo, self-serve check, pricing, or a quiet email. Whichever maps to your stage.