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isai 🤖/👨‍🦰

Identify AIs using the user agent string.

Usage

Install

npm i isai

Straightforward usage

import { isai } from "isai";

// Request
isai(request.headers.get("User-Agent"));

// Nodejs HTTP
isai(request.getHeader("User-Agent"));

// ExpressJS
isai(req.get("user-agent"));

// Browser
isai(navigator.userAgent);

// User Agent string
isai(
  "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot",
); // true

isai(
  "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36",
); // false

Use JSDeliver CDN you can import to the browser directly

See specific versions and instructions https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/isai

ESM

<script type="module">
  import { isai } from "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/isai@5/+esm";
  isai(navigator.userAgent);
</script>

UMD

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/isai@5"></script>
<script>
  // isai is now global
  isai(navigator.userAgent);
</script>

Named imports

import Type Description
isai (string?): boolean Check if the user agent is an AI

FAW

Why are AIs distinct from bots and crawlers?

AIs process information differently than web crawlers:

  • The goal of a crawler is to build a web index, so web developers are incentivised to return more rather than less: more keywords, more re-phrasings, more elaborations.
  • The goal of an AI is to answer acute questions, so web developers are incentivised to return less rather than more: short, specific sentences written in such a way that an LLM can make the most use of them.

What does "isai" do?

Isai approximates whether the originator of a web request is an AI Bot. It does this by looking at the User Agent string.

What doesn't "isai" do?

Isai does not provide a perfectly accurate prediction:

  • Some companies, such as Google and Apple, use ambiguous User Agent strings, meaning that the AI, not AI decision is, at best, a guess.
  • No company is required to divulge whether their bot is an AI, so false negatives are virtually guaranteed.

Why would I want to identify an AI?

You may want to identify an AI if you wish to inject additional and/or different information into your web page for the AI to consume.

For example, you may wish to:

  • Provide an overview of the key points of a page in such a way that would be odd for human consumption.
  • Provide a slightly different set of information for the AI to build up context that it might not otherwise have.