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Concept
User-Agent header
Summary
In computing, the User-Agent header is an HTTP header intended to identify the user agent responsible for making a given HTTP request. Whereas the character sequence User-Agent comprises the name of the header itself, the header value that a given user agent uses to identify itself is colloquially known as its user agent string. The user agent for the operator of a computer used to access the Web has encoded within the rules that govern its behavior the knowledge of how to negotiate its half of a request-response transaction; the user agent thus plays the role of the client in a client–server system. Often considered useful in networks is the ability to identify and distinguish the software facilitating a network session. For this reason, the User-Agent HTTP header exists to identify the client software to the responding server.
When a software agent operates in a network protocol, it often identifies itself, its application type, operating system, device model, software vendor, or software revision, by submitting a characteristic identification string to its operating peer. In HTTP, SIP, and NNTP protocols, this identification is transmitted in a header field User-Agent. Bots, such as Web crawlers, often also include a URL and/or e-mail address so that the Webmaster can contact the operator of the bot.
In HTTP, the "user agent string" is often used for content negotiation, where the origin server selects suitable content or operating parameters for the response. For example, the user agent string might be used by a web server to choose variants based on the known capabilities of a particular version of client software. The concept of content tailoring is built into the HTTP standard in RFC 1945 "for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations".
The user agent string is one of the criteria by which Web crawlers may be excluded from accessing certain parts of a website using the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt file).
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