how to detect search engine bots with php?

Solution 1:

I use the following code which seems to be working fine:

function _bot_detected() {

  return (
    isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
    && preg_match('/bot|crawl|slurp|spider|mediapartners/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
  );
}

update 16-06-2017 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en

added mediapartners

Solution 2:

Here's a Search Engine Directory of Spider names

Then you use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; to check if the agent is said spider.

if(strstr(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), "googlebot"))
{
    // what to do
}

Solution 3:

Check the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] for some of the strings listed here:

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php

Or more specifically for crawlers:

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php?typ=Crawler

If you want to -say- log the number of visits of most common search engine crawlers, you could use

$interestingCrawlers = array( 'google', 'yahoo' );
$pattern = '/(' . implode('|', $interestingCrawlers) .')/';
$matches = array();
$numMatches = preg_match($pattern, strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), $matches, 'i');
if($numMatches > 0) // Found a match
{
  // $matches[1] contains an array of all text matches to either 'google' or 'yahoo'
}

Solution 4:

You can checkout if it's a search engine with this function :

<?php
function crawlerDetect($USER_AGENT)
{
$crawlers = array(
'Google' => 'Google',
'MSN' => 'msnbot',
      'Rambler' => 'Rambler',
      'Yahoo' => 'Yahoo',
      'AbachoBOT' => 'AbachoBOT',
      'accoona' => 'Accoona',
      'AcoiRobot' => 'AcoiRobot',
      'ASPSeek' => 'ASPSeek',
      'CrocCrawler' => 'CrocCrawler',
      'Dumbot' => 'Dumbot',
      'FAST-WebCrawler' => 'FAST-WebCrawler',
      'GeonaBot' => 'GeonaBot',
      'Gigabot' => 'Gigabot',
      'Lycos spider' => 'Lycos',
      'MSRBOT' => 'MSRBOT',
      'Altavista robot' => 'Scooter',
      'AltaVista robot' => 'Altavista',
      'ID-Search Bot' => 'IDBot',
      'eStyle Bot' => 'eStyle',
      'Scrubby robot' => 'Scrubby',
      'Facebook' => 'facebookexternalhit',
  );
  // to get crawlers string used in function uncomment it
  // it is better to save it in string than use implode every time
  // global $crawlers
   $crawlers_agents = implode('|',$crawlers);
  if (strpos($crawlers_agents, $USER_AGENT) === false)
      return false;
    else {
    return TRUE;
    }
}
?>

Then you can use it like :

<?php $USER_AGENT = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
  if(crawlerDetect($USER_AGENT)) return "no need to lang redirection";?>

Solution 5:

I'm using this to detect bots:

if (preg_match('/bot|crawl|curl|dataprovider|search|get|spider|find|java|majesticsEO|google|yahoo|teoma|contaxe|yandex|libwww-perl|facebookexternalhit/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
    // is bot
}

In addition I use a whitelist to block unwanted bots:

if (preg_match('/apple|baidu|bingbot|facebookexternalhit|googlebot|-google|ia_archiver|msnbot|naverbot|pingdom|seznambot|slurp|teoma|twitter|yandex|yeti/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
    // allowed bot
}

An unwanted bot (= false-positive user) is then able to solve a captcha to unblock himself for 24 hours. And as no one solves this captcha, I know it does not produce false-positives. So the bot detection seem to work perfectly.

Note: My whitelist is based on Facebooks robots.txt.