Unblock: a Claude Code skill that keeps trying when a web lookup fails
A web search fails. You retry it. It fails again, same way. That loop wastes turns and gets nothing done, so I built a skill that skips the retry and moves on instead. Unblock is a Claude Code skill for exactly that moment: a search, scrape, or crawl gets blocked, rate limited, hit with a CAPTCHA, or just returns nothing. Instead of trying the same tool again, it moves to the next one in a fixed…
Unblock is a Claude Code skill designed to automatically switch from one web search, scrape, or crawl tool to another when a particular tool fails due to being blocked, rate limited, or returning an empty result. This skill is particularly useful when dealing with sites that employ paywalls, bot walls, JavaScript-heavy pages, or social platforms that fight against automated access.
The chain of 13 free tools that Unblock utilizes runs in a specific order, starting with the most general and robust tools first, before narrowing down to more specialized ones. This order begins with the agent-reach tool, which accesses multi-platform platforms such as Xiaohongshu, X, Bilibili, Reddit, GitHub, YouTube, LinkedIn, RSS, and general web content. Following this, the last30days tool searches for recent discussions from Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, Hacker News, and GitHub.
Next, the Jina Reader and Scrapling stealth browser tools are employed, with the latter turning a URL into clean markdown web-scraping and choosing the appropriate scraping method based on the site's layout, whether it's traffic interception, sitemap, API, DOM scraping, or simple web-scraping. The web-scraping-automation tool, using Playwright/requests and generic REST and GraphQL calls, attempts to scrape web pages while respecting the site's robots.txt file.
The playwright-web-scraper and web-scraper tools further enhance the chain with multi-page structured extraction, handling rate limits and adhering to robots.txt rules. The site-crawler tool provides a straightforward solution for multi-page crawling, while the scraping-skills tool bundles a variety of academic and ethical scraping techniques.
Finally, the scrapy-web-scraping tool utilizes the Scrapy framework for large-scale multi-page crawls, and news-extractor is optimized for extracting information from news and articles across 12 different sites. The last tool in the chain, Scrapling, is a Python library, serving as a last resort for creating and running a short stealth-fetch script.
All tools in the chain remain free and do not require any API keys, paid tiers, or accounts. When a block or an empty result is encountered, the skill moves on to the next tool in the chain without retrying the same tool again. The chain concludes by reporting which tool successfully retrieved the desired information, or it states that all 13 tools failed.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
