Novel Cognition launches 13 Labs to detect AI agents and bots

Novel Cognition has launched 13 Labs, a specialized project designed to distinguish between different types of web visitors. Unlike traditional methods that primarily separate humans from bots, 13 Labs introduces a third category: 'Hybrid.' This category identifies AI agents, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, that fetch web pages on behalf of a human user.

The system classifies visitors into four distinct groups: Human (real people interacting with the page), Hybrid (AI agents acting for a person), Machine (automated crawlers or scrapers), and Unresolved (visitors that provide no trusted input). The technology operates without the use of cookies and provides real-time verdicts on the nature of the visitor.

As part of its experimental framework, 13 Labs tracks various hypotheses through specific experiments. One notable instance involved catching a scraper disguised as a Chrome browser on a Pixel 6 phone that attempted to access forbidden paths in a robots.txt file. The project aims to provide more accurate traffic data for a web environment increasingly populated by AI-driven interactions.