HeadlessChrome

Last updated a day ago.

Headless Chrome is provided by Chromium, Google's open source browser project. It gives other software the ability to render web pages in full detail. The most common use case is automated testing software, but it's also the main thing that enables autonomous AI agents interact with the internet as if they were humans.

You can set up agent analytics to see when HeadlessChrome visits your website.

Detail

Documentation

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/chromium/headless

Type

Headless Browser

A code library used to automate web browsing

Expected Behavior

The behavior of headless browsers generally depends who is using them and what exactly they're using them for. Patterns could vary significantly depending whether the operator is human-guided software (e.g. performance testing), or an autonomous AI agent acting like a human.

Insights

HeadlessChrome Visiting Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

0% of top websites are blocking HeadlessChrome

Learn How →

Access Control

Should I Block HeadlessChrome?

Probably not. Headless browsers normally don't follow robots.txt rules anyway.

Using Robots.txt

You can block HeadlessChrome or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. We recommend setting up agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent Token	Description
`HeadlessChrome`	Should match instances of HeadlessChrome

# robots.txt
# This should block HeadlessChrome

User-agent: HeadlessChrome
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt