How SMG Blocks Millions of Scrapers Daily to Protect Switzerland’s Leading Marketplace Platforms

Swiss Marketplace Group (SMG) is Switzerland’s leading digital marketplace operator, running some of the country’s most visited online platforms, including Homegate and ImmoScout, the two largest real estate listing sites in Switzerland. The group also operates FlatFox, extending its reach across rental housing. Across this portfolio, SMG manages enormous volumes of structured listing data that represent significant business value and an equally significant target for automated abuse.

The challenge: Persistent scraping, a patchwork of defenses, & zero room for false positives 

For SMG, scraping was not a sudden crisis, it was a persistent, ongoing problem with real business consequences. Competing platforms were extracting listing data from Homegate and ImmoScout and republishing it on their own portals, effectively siphoning user traffic and taking away from SMG’s brands.

Over the years, SMG had assembled a layered set of defenses: CDN-level bot detection, internal rate-limiting mechanisms, and custom-built countermeasures. But keeping up with the constantly evolving bot landscape with new evasion techniques, new scraping tools, etc. required dedicated research capacity that SMG’s internal teams couldn’t sustain alone. Competitor solutions, while useful across many dimensions, simply weren’t specialized enough in bot detection to address the full scope of the threat.

At the same time, SMG’s platform teams were acutely sensitive to false positives. Any solution that wrongly challenged or blocked real users like apartment seekers, car buyers, or property listers would immediately trigger complaints. Detection quality and user experience weren’t competing priorities; both had to be met.

The solution: Purpose-built bot protection that keeps pace with the threat 

SMG ran a structured RFQ process with clear non-negotiables: high detection accuracy, minimal user friction, and industry recognition by leading analysts, such as Forrester. DataDome excelled in all three and won the evaluation.

DataDome’s Bot Protect is currently deployed on Homegate and ImmoScout,  SMG’s two flagship platforms, with FlatFox currently being onboarded. The integration runs server-side, fitting seamlessly into SMG’s existing cloud infrastructure. The breadth of DataDome’s integration options supporting both server-side and client-side frameworks was itself a huge deciding factor for SMG, as they weren’t forced into a single configuration path.

The results: Millions of bots blocked daily, with the user experience intact 

Since deploying DataDome, SMG has been blocking millions of bots per day across its marketplace platforms at a scale and consistency that internal tools and CDN-level protections could not match. This protection is being delivered with the low false-positive rates that SMG’s platform teams require, preserving the experience for legitimate users.

Beyond raw blocking volume, DataDome has given SMG visibility into the full breadth of automated traffic it faces, including the wide variety of lower-priority bots that SMG’s internal analysts wouldn’t have had the time or tools to recognize and classify individually.

For SMG, the engagement model has been as important as the technology. Bi-weekly operational calls keep both teams aligned, and SMG’s security team regularly shares analytical findings with DataDome’s Threat Research team with feedback that feeds back into detection behavior over time. SMG’s team also highlighted the quality of DataDome’s interactive challenge as a meaningful differentiator in an environment where even mildly frustrating friction generates user complaints. 

As SMG continues to expand DataDome protection across additional brands in its portfolio, the ability to maintain consistent, scalable bot protection across multiple platforms with varying infrastructure is proving to be a lasting operational advantage.

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