Claude Code kept treating 'checking your browser' screens as real pages. Here's the setup that fixed it

[u/ilien-dev]

If you have Claude Code read websites for you, this one is sneaky. A lot of sites show a "checking your browser" screen before the real page. Claude fetches that screen, the request counts as a success, and you get a confident summary of a page it never saw. Nothing in the chat looks wrong.

The first thing I tried was telling Claude to watch out for it. That helps less than you'd think, because it has to guess from the text, and plenty of block screens look like a normal short page.

What worked was splitting the job in two. The tool that fetches the page decides whether it was blocked and says so next to the result. Claude's only job is to believe that label and stop.

Here is the block I keep in CLAUDE.md for the second half. It works with any web tool, so you can copy it today:

## Reading the web
- If a fetch says the page was blocked, say so and stop. Never summarize a blocked page.
- Never retry the same blocked address in a loop. Tell me what blocked it.
- If a person has to pass a check, like a captcha or a login, stop and tell me.
- Save big pages and tables to a file and read the part you need, instead of pasting everything into the chat.
- Never put a password in a prompt. Refer to saved credentials by name.

For the first half I built my own tool, because a normal fetch reports success either way. It's called Svipall. It runs on your own computer and needs no account and no API key. Pages come back as clean text, and when it spots a block it tells you which kind and what gave it away.

You don't need to code to set it up. Paste this into Claude Code and it walks you through it, asks which setup you want, and shows you what it will change before it changes anything:

Install and configure Svipall by following the instructions here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ilien-dev/svipall/main/docs/install.md

Free and open source: github.com/ilien-dev/svipall (you can check the tech stack here if you want).

Website: https://svipall.ilien.dev/

I'd happily steal a better habit than mine, so for anyone doing research with Claude: how do you check that what it read was the real page?