What is an Agent?
An agent can refer to several different things. In the context of the web, marketing and SEO, it is often used to describe when a visitor accesses a website — either a visitor in the form of a person or a robot (e.g. a search engine). In this context, it is referred to as a User Agent.
When a user visits your website, a message is sent containing the agent's name, which in the case of browsers is the name of the browser itself.
Some examples include the following:
- Google Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
- Internet Explorer: Mozilla/5.0 CK={} (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
- Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (platform; rv:geckoversion) Gecko/geckotrail Firefox/firefoxversion
When a search engine visits your website, the bot's name is included. Examples include the following:
- Google: Googlebot
- Bing: Bingbot
- Yandex: Yandex bot
Where do you find agent information?
If you want to view information about User Agents, you can find this in your website's log files. Here you can also analyse which agents and robots have visited your website — and how, when, and more.
Curious about how agent information can improve your website's performance?
Contact us on 30 12 42 72 and we will help you analyse your traffic!
