How can PHP be used to differentiate between actual users and automated bots when tracking visitor numbers on a website?

To differentiate between actual users and automated bots when tracking visitor numbers on a website, you can implement a simple check based on user-agent strings. Bots often have unique user-agent strings that can be used to identify them. By checking the user-agent string of incoming requests, you can filter out known bots and only count actual user visits. 

// Get the user-agent string from the incoming request
$userAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

// List of known bot user-agent strings
$botUserAgents = array('Googlebot', 'Bingbot', 'Yahoo! Slurp', 'Baiduspider');

// Check if the user-agent string matches any known bot
$isBot = false;
foreach ($botUserAgents as $bot) {
    if (stripos($userAgent, $bot) !== false) {
        $isBot = true;
        break;
    }
}

// Increment visitor count only if it's not a bot
if (!$isBot) {
    // Increment visitor count logic here
}

Keywords

PHP user agent session management CAPTCHA IP address tracking

Related Questions