useBotDetection()

Introduction

Type: function useBotDetection(options?: UseBotDetectionOptions): UseBotDetectionReturn

Types are auto-imported when using the composable.

Detect and classify bots using server-side header analysis and optional client-side browser fingerprinting.

The composable provides reactive access to bot detection results with automatic caching. Client-side fingerprinting is opt-in due to performance costs.

🔔 Important: Bot detection only runs when you use this composable. No automatic bot detection occurs - it's entirely opt-in based on your usage of this composable.

Usage

Basic detection:

import { useBotDetection } from '#robots/app'

const { isBot, botName, botCategory, trusted } = useBotDetection()
// isBot: ComputedRef<boolean>
// botName: ComputedRef<BotName | undefined> // 'googlebot', 'facebook', etc.
// botCategory: ComputedRef<BotCategory | undefined> // 'search-engine', 'social', etc.
// trusted: ComputedRef<boolean | undefined>

With fingerprinting:

import { useBotDetection } from '#robots/app'

const { isBot, botName, botCategory, trusted, reset } = useBotDetection({
  fingerprint: true,
  onFingerprintError: (error) => {
    console.error('Fingerprint error:', error)
  },
  onFingerprintResult: (result) => {
    console.log('Fingerprinting completed:', result)
  }
})

Watching for changes:

import { useBotDetection } from '#robots/app'
import { watch } from 'vue'

const { isBot, botName, botCategory } = useBotDetection()

watch(isBot, (detected) => {
  if (detected) {
    console.log(`Bot: ${botName.value} (${botCategory.value})`)
  }
})

Options

interface UseBotDetectionOptions {
  fingerprint?: boolean
  onFingerprintError?: (error: Error) => void
  onFingerprintResult?: (result: BotDetectionContext | null) => void
}

fingerprint: Type: boolean, Default: false. Enable automatic client-side fingerprinting when no bot is detected server-side.

onFingerprintError: Type: (error: Error) => void. Error handler for fingerprinting failures.

onFingerprintResult: Type: (result: BotDetectionContext | null) => void. Callback that fires when fingerprinting completes, providing the final detection result.

Return Type

interface UseBotDetectionReturn {
  isBot: ComputedRef<boolean>
  botName: ComputedRef<BotName | undefined>
  botCategory: ComputedRef<BotCategory | undefined>
  trusted: ComputedRef<boolean | undefined>
  reset: () => void
}

Return Value

isBot: Type: ComputedRef<boolean>. Reactive boolean indicating whether a bot was detected.

botName: Type: ComputedRef<BotName | undefined>. The specific bot identity (e.g., 'googlebot', 'facebook', 'claude', 'selenium'). undefined if no bot detected.

botCategory: Type: ComputedRef<BotCategory | undefined>. The bot category/purpose (e.g., 'search-engine', 'social', 'ai', 'automation'). undefined if no bot detected.

trusted: Type: ComputedRef<boolean | undefined>. Whether the detected bot is considered trusted. undefined if no bot detected.

reset(): Type: () => void. Clear all detection state and cached results.

Server Side Behavior

On the server, bot detection runs when you use the composable:

import { useBotDetection } from '#robots/app'

// Only runs when composable is used
const { isBot, botName, botCategory } = useBotDetection()

if (isBot.value) {
  // Bot detected via server-side analysis
  console.log('Bot:', botName.value, 'Category:', botCategory.value)
}

Client Side Behavior

If the server-side detection is unavailable (e.g. SPA mode), it will fallback to using navigator.userAgent.

Client-side fingerprinting is automatic when enabled:

import { useBotDetection } from '#robots/app'

const { isBot, botName, botCategory } = useBotDetection({
  fingerprint: true,
  onFingerprintError: (error) => {
    console.error('Fingerprinting failed:', error)
  }
})

// Fingerprinting runs automatically if no server detection occurred

Configuration

Disabling bot detection. You can disable the entire bot detection plugin:

import { defineNuxtConfig } from 'nuxt/config'

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  robots: {
    botDetection: false
  }
})

When disabled, the useBotDetection composable will return a mock implementation with default values (e.g., isBot: false).

Bot Categories

The following bot types are detected:

• search-engine: Google, Bing, Yandex crawlers
• social: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn bots
• seo: Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic tools
• ai: GPT, Claude, Perplexity crawlers
• generic: Generic bot, spider, crawler patterns
• automation: Selenium, Puppeteer, WebDriver
• http-tool: curl, wget, Python requests
• security-scanner: nmap, Nikto, ZGrab
• scraping: Scrapy and dedicated scraping tools