This page has some extra information on common errors people often run into. If you are confused about your error and don't see anything helpful here, please send us a support request explaining the problem and we'll try and help.

Your chosen selectors have failed to find any content on page / element not found

The most common type of error, this means that the selector that you provided was not on the page when Axiom tried to find it. There can be a number of causes.

Changing selectors

Often, re-selecting your selectors is sufficient if this has been working well in the past.

When scraping multiple pages of data, you can get inconsistencies. This is usually because there are subtle changes in between particular pages that are causing a selector that works on one page to fail on another.

Sometimes, there is a more general selector you can choose. In general, when Axiom shows you the selection box, you should move the mouse and choose the largest box that you can which still selects only the data you want. This has a greater chance of working across multiple pages.

To check this, open the selector tool on a page that Axiom will visit, but not the one that you originally chose data on. Axiom will highlight what it sees on that page and you should be able to spot and amend missing selections this way.

If all else fails and the website is not playing ball, then you can try using custom selectors: Using custom selectors

This one can be hard to debug! Reach out to us if you are stuck. You may have even found a bug in our algorithms!

Bot is on the wrong page

Sometimes the bot can end up on a page you aren't expecting, in which case it will fail to scrape. Double check the URL that the bot is on and whether it matches what you intended, and if not amend it.

Page did not load in time

The issue here is that the page is still loading when the scraper triggers. Try adding a min wait to the scraper to force it to wait a little longer before starting.

Your bot was blocked

This can sometimes occur, particularly when using the cloud. Often a simple solution is to download our desktop app and try running it there. As this is running locally on your computer, there are fewer ways for websites to detect and block your automation.

Text is not iterable

This message means that the data variable you provided to an "Enter Text" or "Press Key(s)" step was blank. Double check that the data variable you are using has a value, and if you're really confused reach out to us - we can likely spot the problem if you share your automation with us.

(Something) is not a character

This appears when using the Press Key(s) step with a data variable, and is almost always because you forgot to add the delimeter into your data.

The reason that this delimiter is required is because there are some key presses which are not single characters, for example "Space", "Control", "Alt" etc. These words can also appear in normal sentences, so the delimiter is needed to precisely specify which things are single key presses and which are words to type.

In a nutshell, if you want to type "Foo", make sure the data you are using contains "F||o||o" - this should then work correctly.

"Requested entity not found" when trying to use a Google Sheet

Most likely, this is because the google sheet you are viewing is not shared with the account you have linked to Axiom. Double check the sharing settings with the spreadsheet and your Axiom sheet settings, which you can find here.

It also could be because the Google Sheets URL you have provided does not exist!

Run time errors when running long automations

Each pricing tier has a limit on the amount of runtime they can use in a single run. There's more info on our pricing page.

If you have a large job to do, and don't want to sign up to a more expensive account, we recommend breaking the task up into stages. Rather than processing 100,000 records in one go, it's often much better to go in batches of 1000 at a time. As well as being kind to our servers, this also reduces the chance of errors and makes it much less painful if you do run into a problem!

For more information on how to go about this within Axiom in a convenient way, please see Batch long jobs using Google Sheets.

Text must be a valid JSON string

When creating a webhook using the "Trigger Webhook" step, this error will occur if there's a problem validating your JSON.

A common mistake is to miss out double quote characters around keys or values. For example, this is not valid JSON:

{
  key: "value"
}

Whereas this is:

{
  "key": "value"
}

One handy tip here is to check your work with a JSON validator such as JSONLint (opens new window), which will highlight any syntax errors you may have and give you advice on how to fix them.