Most AI browsing agents look like ordinary Chrome visitors, study finds

A test of 23 AI agents, chatbots and developer tools sent to a mock notes app site found that most browser-based agents were indistinguishable from people using Chrome. Most did not disclose that they were automated and often sent standard Chrome user agents, sometimes from the same home connection used by the researchers. Only a few identified themselves, and just one, Manus, signed its requests in a way a site could verify. Chatbots that merely fetch pages usually identified themselves to servers and skipped analytics, though two ran page scripts and appeared as visitors who left immediately. The researchers concluded that click timing did not reveal agents, but the way the pointer moved to buttons did for every clicking agent tested.