Why is my robot failing when trying to close a cookie notice or popup?

Sometimes you may notice that your robot is failing to close a cookie notice or newsletter modal and is skipping every other step. Let's see why this happens and how you can solve it.

When you record a task on your machine, your Browse AI robot is trained to perform the same task on any similar page on that website.

Sometimes, during recording, you get a cookie privacy policy notice or newsletter popup on the target website and you close it. The robot learns to do the same and close the notice when it appears.

Most of the time, this works out fine. However, in some cases, these notices do NOT appear when the robot tries to perform the task. This usually happens when the site is A/B testing modals/popups or the robot has not been able to proxy its network requests from your country, so it has used a US-based proxy server, and the site does not show the notice to visitors from the US.

In these scenarios, the robot waits for the notice to appear and when it does not, the robot fails because it can't be certain that without closing a notice, it would be able to capture accurate data.

Solution 1

First of all, when you record a task, if you don't *have to* close a notice, don't close it. Just leave it as is and show the robot the data you want to capture. This works most of the time when the cookie notice doesn't cover the entire page and is just stuck to the bottom or the top of the screen.

Solution 2

If you're not planning to run the robot too many times or the target site does not seem to have advanced bot detection, you can enable recording your session cookies by checking the "This site needs logging in" option when you create the robot. If you enable this option, the cookie notice or modal should not appear during recording anymore and the robot should be able to perform the task without getting interrupted by it.

Solution 3

Alternatively, if the notice is covering the screen and the robot is not getting the same notice and failing, you can always reach out to support via the chat widget on the bottom-right of the screen to ask them to manually fix this for you by removing the 'click' step from the recorded task.

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