How to identify if a page request is for a preview

When I paste my website link at a social network (Facebook or Twitter for example), the social network access my site to show a preview to the user.

I want to separate this access from real access at my reports, but to do this, I need to identify this cases.

This kind of access send any kind of information that is default for everysite that I can identify that this access is not a real user, but a robot?

2 Answers

Answers 1

You should be able to identify those robots from their user-agent string. For example, Twitter uses the User-Agent of Twitterbot. And Facebook crawler identification is documented here.

Answers 2

You can use the User-Agent to do that.

if (strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "Twitterbot") !== false)    echo "TwitterBot"; else if (strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "facebookexternalhit") !== false)    echo "Facebook"; else    echo "regular user"; 

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler

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