Hacker News Reader

Oh, and as for the agents themselves browsing the website, if the agent uses an actual browser with JS enabled (like headless puppeteer), then you would actually be able to see how the agent browsed the website.

View on HN

Yes, but how can you tell if it was an agent with full browser?

If they don't set the proper UserAgent, it's not trivial.

You could add some JS to test it and store it as a tag, maybe using something like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78629469/407650

That's a good start I'd say, but I agree with you that detection is not trivial. I wonder if there's enough value in distinguishing between AI agents (with full browser) and humans. What use cases would it enable?

For the distinguishing part, it's hard to tell if it can be done anyway, as the agent browsers are still new and constantly changing, and it's up to them if they will correctly identify themselves or not (same as with crawler/bots, the main indication is still the source IP address).

There could be use cases, like tracking if your content was stolen/parsed by an AI, maybe future pay-per-request for LLMs, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com