Session management in web scraping refers to the persistence and replay of cookies, authentication tokens, and browser state across a sequence of requests that must appear to come from the same continuous user session. Many sites require an active session cookie — obtained by logging in or accepting a cookie consent — before they will serve protected content.
Session cookies typically have short lifetimes and must be refreshed by re-authenticating periodically. Beyond cookies, sessions may involve CSRF tokens embedded in forms, OAuth access tokens refreshed via refresh token flows, or browser fingerprint binding where the session validates that the fingerprint matches across requests.
AlterLab supports session persistence via session IDs that maintain the same browser context — cookies, local storage, and fingerprint — across multiple requests. This enables multi-step workflows: log in on step one, navigate authenticated pages on subsequent steps, all appearing as one continuous user session from the same IP and browser fingerprint.