What Is User Agent?
Each program or website visitor has a unique identification code known as the user agent. The user agent reveals information about the software that is used to access a website, whether it is a desktop computer, smartphone, tablet, or other device. The user agent tells website administrators what to expect and enables them to create customized web pages that are more appealing for certain devices. For example, if you access a website on your iPhone, the user agent will say “iPhone”; if you access the same site on your laptop, the user agent will say “Laptops”.
When a program such as a web browser communicates with another program or device, it includes its user agent in the communication. The other program can analyze the user agent to determine which software or device is sending it information.
Bot User Agents – What Are They?
A step up that helps developers easily identify bots and track their activity in web analytics platforms is the use of bot user agents. A bot user agent is a string of characters a bot identifies itself by when interacting with another program or website. A bot uses its user agent to identify itself so other programs or websites can respond appropriately.
You can find more information about bots and their user agents on Automatic Identification of Bot User Agents in Web Analytics (PDF).
What Are Bot User Agents Used For?
Identifying bots is necessary when you want to know how many visitors arrive at your website via search engines or social media, and how many of those visitors simply scan without engaging with any pages. Also, bots are used to generate fake traffic or push backlinks to manipulate search engine results. Therefore, identifying them and disregarding their visits can lead to more realistic results. If a high number of visits come from bots and not humans, for instance, you may suspect something fishy is going on that could hurt your business reputation online.
Finally, monitoring visitors from specific bot groups can facilitate decision-making in online marketing efforts as well as disaster recovery planning. For example, if you know that major search engines regularly crawl your website and index new content, you won’t have problems with appearing in search results. On the other hand, if a group of unknown bots frequently accesses your site’s administrative pages and doesn’t interact with any content, you may want to restrict their access to those pages or even block them completely.
What Are The Benefits Of Having An API To Detect Bot
This API will allow you to detect any Bot, Crawler, or Spider via their User Agent. Prevent malicious behavior on your applications!
You can check Bot Detector Via User Agent API for free here.
