The blocked portal
A captured run from question to cited answer: the host's native fetch refuses realestate.com.au outright; Search reads the same page in a full browser — 904 live listings, sorted by price — and the agent answers with citations. Provenance included.
The research question
"What's on the apartment market in Perth's CBD right now — how many listings, and where does pricing start?" The best source is the portal itself. Portals block ordinary tools. Every capture on this page is from one run on 29 Oct 2026, ~02:26 UTC, from Claude Code — payloads verbatim, long bodies excerpted.
Same URL, two tools
Claude Code's native fetch refuses the domain outright — zero bytes (other clients typically fail at the site's bot wall instead). Search's fetch opens the same URL in a full browser and returns the page as markdown. The URL asks for price order — the portal's default "Featured" order doesn't put the cheapest first.
// host's built-in fetch WebFetch("https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/property-unit+apartment-in-perth+cbd/list-1?activeSort=price-asc") Error: Claude Code is unable to fetch from www.realestate.com.au ✗ Refused — the question is unanswerable from here
// same URL, Search's fetch tool fetch("https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/property-unit+apartment-in-perth+cbd/list-1?activeSort=price-asc") [via stealth] # Apartments & units for sale in Perth - CBD and Inner Suburbs, WA Showing 1 – 25 of 904 properties Sort: Price (Lowest - Highest) Offers over $200,000 411/297-305 Murray St $232,000 316/305 Murray St $249,000 426/305 Murray St $289,000 723/305 Murray St Mid $300k's 25/451 Murray St · 2 bed … [1] [2] [3] [4] … [37] Next
The answer the agent can now give
Every figure traces to the captured page — nothing summarised from snippets, and the scope of the evidence is stated with the answer.
Perth CBD and inner suburbs currently list 904 apartments
& units for sale. The cheapest priced listing is offers
over $200,000 (411/297-305 Murray Street — a 39 m² serviced
one-bed). The bottom of the market sits in one building: 305
Murray Street one-beds at $232,000–$289,000. Two-beds start
in the mid-$300ks (25/451 Murray Street, under offer).
Source: realestate.com.au buy listing, price low → high,
page 1 of 37, read 29 Oct 2026 02:26 UTC via full browser.
Scope: 25 of 904 listings shown; unpriced listings are not
counted as the floor.
Measured improvement, and where this came from
Without Search: 0 bytes — no answer exists. With Search: the full listing page as clean markdown, in price order, read by a full browser. An independent timed probe of the same URL, through the public try widget, read it in 10.6 s while the origin answered HTTP 429 — the full browser rendered the real page anyway. Repeat reads within 24 h come from cache.
client Claude Code over MCP (WebFetch refusal captured same minute) 02:25:57 WebFetch → refused · zero bytes 02:26:01 fetch (MCP) → [via stealth], full page as markdown 02:38:40 timed probe → origin HTTP 429 · 19,008 chars · 10.6 s scope page 1 of 37 · 25 of 904 listings · price low → high retention the page as received, 24 h in workspace activity