Detect Search Engine Bot using CrawlerDetect Library in PHP

A search engine bot also known as web crawler or spider is a type of bot that is used to index web content in order to present websites in search engine results. There might be cases when we want to detect if a website visitor is a bot.

CrawlerDetect is a PHP library that allows to detect bots based on User-Agent request header.

Add CrawlerDetect library to composer.json file:

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"require": {
    "jaybizzle/crawler-detect": "^1.2"
}

Install library from the command line:

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composer install

We have created an instance of CrawlerDetect class. The isCrawler method returns true if bot is detected.

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<?php

use Jaybizzle\CrawlerDetect\CrawlerDetect;

require_once __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';

$detect = new CrawlerDetect();

if ($detect->isCrawler()) {
    echo 'Bot';
}