User agents are a critical but often overlooked aspect of web browsing. If you’ve never heard of them before, don’t worry!
Simply put, a user agent is a computer program that represents a person—like your web browser. When you request a webpage, the server receives your user agent and responds accordingly. In most cases, this just means you get served the content you asked for, and you go about your business.
However, not all user agents are treated equally. Some represent search engine bots (like GoogleBot) or AI scrapers (like GPTBot).
Website owners or administrators can choose to handle these non-human user agents differently—blocking them, serving different content, or applying restrictions.
Does Your Website Treat Bots Differently?
Want to find out if your server treats human users differently from bots? Here are a couple of easy ways to check:
1. Testing in Chrome
Step 1: Right-click anywhere on the page and navigate to Inspect > Network Tools > User-Agent.
Step 2: Uncheck "Use browser default," select Custom from the list, and paste in the user agent you want to test.
Step 3: Reload the page with the new user agent, then copy and paste the HTML into Diff Checker.
Step 4: Reset the user agent back to default, reload the page again, and compare the HTML using Diff Checker. This will show you any differences in how the server responds to different user agents.
2. Using Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool is another excellent way to check how your website responds to different user agents:
Step 1: Set your user agent in Screaming Frog by following their user-agent guide.
Step 2: First, crawl your site using a normal Chrome user agent (Google "What is my user agent" to find your current one).
Step 3: Then, crawl again using Googlebot’s user agent, which you can find here.
Step 4: Compare the two crawls to see if the server responds differently to bots versus human users.
Things to Keep in Mind
While these methods are straightforward, some content delivery networks (CDNs), like Akamai or Fastly, are smarter than a simple user agent check.
They may block anyone trying to “spoof” Googlebot by looking at more than just the user agent. If you encounter issues, check with your IT team for advice.
By testing how your site responds to different user agents, you can gain insight into whether your server is treating human visitors differently from search engines or other bots—and make adjustments as needed.
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