counter-robots 2025.2

Library for COUNTER-compliant detection of machines and robots.

The purpose behind COUNTER is to enable comparable usage statistics by only reporting genuine user-driven usage for repositories. The purpose behind Code of Practice for Research Data is to split genuine COUNTER user-driven usage into human- and machine-based access.

This Python library implements a tiny API to check if a given user agent string from a browser is considered a robot/crawler/spider or a machine according to the Code of Practice for Research Data [1] as well as the COUNTER Code of Practice.

The library depends on official lists published by both projects. You can see the lists on:

• Making Data Count

• COUNTER