Most of the store-locator scrapers I build never touch a browser. I open the Network tab, find the JSON endpoint the map calls, hit it with fetch, done. A browser is slow, hungry, and flaky, so I treat it as the last resort.
National Book Tokens is where the last resort actually kicked in. It's a UK book gift-card brand, and their "find a bookshop" page shows a Google-Maps-style board of pins for every shop that takes the card. I wanted the full geocoded list. So I did the usual thing: opened the page, opened DevTools, watched the Network tab reload.
Nothing. No /api/shops, no locations.json, no XHR carrying an array of bookshops. The map just... had pins. That absence is the whole story, and it's the thing worth learning, because it's the signal that tells you a browser is unavoidable instead of just habit.
How to tell a browser is actually required
Here's the test I run before I let myself spin up Chrome. It takes about thirty seconds.
