Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Is the Harris County HCAD property search blocked by Cloudflare?

County property records · minimum viable tier: no tier sufficient · measured 2026-08-18

Probably not, and this page exists to correct the record rather than to report a tier. All 60 requests to the URL in the target list returned HTTP 404, and the benchmark filed them as cloudflare_challenge, producing 0% on all six arms. The 404 body is Microsoft IIS's stock "file or directory not found" page. The measured URL does not exist. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://public.hcad.org/records/quicksearch.asp
Content assertion HCAD|Harris Central Appraisal — never verified against a live page
Arms 6
Rounds per arm 10
Requests 60
Measured 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC
Benchmark host DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3)

A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.

This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.

Results by arm

Arm Success p50 p95 Bytes per success Outcomes
direct (no proxy) 0% 154 ms 188 ms n/a challenge 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 0% 478 ms 20,539 ms n/a challenge 9, server error 1
datacenter, rotating exit 0% 451 ms 1,177 ms n/a challenge 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 0% 466 ms 20,377 ms n/a challenge 9, server error 1
anti-detect, rotating exit 0% 332 ms 1,390 ms n/a challenge 10
residential, rotating exit 0% 1,821 ms 30,102 ms n/a challenge 9, error 1

What protects this target

Unknown, because nothing here measured a live page.

Fifty-seven of the 60 requests returned a byte-identical 2,183-byte HTTP 404. The reconnaissance probe captured its text: "404 - File or directory not found. Server Error 404 - File or directory not found. The resource you are looking for..." — that is the IIS default error page, and its title is 404 - File or directory not found.

Why it was recorded as a Cloudflare challenge is a defect in the harness rather than a fact about Harris County. classify() in harness.py tests the challenge signatures against the response body before it looks at anything else for any status other than 403, 429, 401/407 and 5xx. Cloudflare injects its cdn-cgi/challenge-platform script into responses it proxies, including error responses, so an ordinary 404 served through Cloudflare matches cloudflare_challenge and is scored as a block.

Both URLs tried for this target 404'd. The first, hcad.org/property-search/, returned a 51,106-byte 404 carrying the district's own navigation; the second, public.hcad.org/records/quicksearch.asp, returned the 2,183-byte IIS page that was then benchmarked. PROTECTION-CENSUS.md records the conclusion "Harris County TX sits behind Cloudflare" — which may well be true of the domain, but no evidence in this dataset supports it, because no request in this dataset reached a page.

robots.txt status

The host serves no robots.txt — the request returns HTTP 404. Nothing is disallowed, and nothing is granted either.
Status allowed
File https://public.hcad.org/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note no robots.txt (HTTP 404)

Limits of this result

  • No live Harris County page was measured. The 0% figures on this page describe requests to a URL that does not exist and must not be quoted as a pass rate for HCAD.
  • The cloudflare_challenge label on all 57 recorded rows is a classifier false positive and should be treated as unlabelled.
  • Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
  • One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
  • The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.

Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets

The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,us_tx_harris_prop,' raw.csv.

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