Can a WordPress cron job run when a bot visits the site?

Question

I understand a WP cron job is activated when someone visits that particular website. But, suppose, if Google bot visits the site to index it, can it start the scheduled cron jobs?

Answer 1

Yes, a bot visit is same to a website like a normal user visit unless you tell the site the difference between a bot visit and a user visit.

For instance the difference between a user visit and bot visit can be checked as follows:

USER:

if (strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']),"bot")) {
    // It's a bot :)
} else {
    // Otherwise it's a user
}

'HTTP_USER_AGENT'

Contents of the User-Agent: header from the current request, if there is one. This is a string denoting the user agent being which is accessing the page. A typical example is: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.9 i586). Among other things, you can use this value with get_browser() to tailor your page's output to the capabilities of the user agent.

Take a look at the link as well:

How works HTTP_USER_AGENT