Synthetic user journeys – scripted, automated reproductions of how a “typical” customer navigates a website or app – have become a core technique for modern product, growth, and reliability teams. They are especially powerful when implemented via headless browsers, which can fully render pages, execute JavaScript, and behave like real users from the perspective of the target site.
In 2025, the debate between headless and headful browsers is no longer academic. It sits at the core of how organizations approach web automation, testing, AI agents, and scraping under increasingly aggressive bot-detection regimes. At the same time, AI-driven scraping backbones like ScrapingAnt - which combine headless Chrome clusters, rotating proxies, and CAPTCHA avoidance - have reshaped what “production-ready” scraping looks like.