isCrawler snippet

Detects if the current visitor is a bot (web crawler) by the User-Agent header. Use for conditional output or counters.

Returns: "1" (bot) or "0" (not bot).

Important: call uncached — [[!isCrawler]] (MODX) or $modx->runSnippet('isCrawler', []) (Fenom). Otherwise the result is cached and won’t match the current visitor.

Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
userAgent	User-Agent string to check (if empty — from current request)	—
placeholderPrefix	Placeholder prefix for detected bot name	crawlerdetect.

When a bot is detected, placeholder crawlerdetect.matches (or your prefix) is set to the bot name (e.g. Googlebot) — useful for debugging.

Examples

Show widget to humans only

modx

[[!isCrawler:eq=`0`:then=`[[$chatWidget]]`]]

fenom

{if $modx->runSnippet('isCrawler', []) == '0'}
  {$modx->getChunk('chatWidget')}
{/if}

Don’t load analytics for bots

modx

[[!isCrawler:eq=`0`:then=`[[$googleAnalytics]]`]]

fenom

{if $modx->runSnippet('isCrawler', []) == '0'}
  {$modx->getChunk('googleAnalytics')}
{/if}

Different content for bot and human

modx

[[!isCrawler:eq=`0`:then=`[[$fullContent]]`:else=`[[$liteContent]]`]]

fenom

{set $isBot = $modx->runSnippet('isCrawler', [])}
{if $isBot == '0'}
  {$modx->getChunk('fullContent')}
{else}
  {$modx->getChunk('liteContent')}
{/if}

Debug: which bot was detected

modx

[[!isCrawler]]
[[+crawlerdetect.matches]]

fenom

{$modx->runSnippet('isCrawler', [])}
{if $modx->getPlaceholder('crawlerdetect.matches')}
  Bot: {$modx->getPlaceholder('crawlerdetect.matches')}
{/if}