Detect synthetic clicks on a webpage

Question

Through Javascript is it possible to detect synthetic clicks (the clicks that were not generated by human but instead was generated using JS or some other automation tool) ?

Answer 1

This is an old question but the accepted answer uses jQuery and I'm sure a lot of visitors here are looking for a vanilla JS solution. If you don't need to support IE, you can use Event.isTrusted:

document.querySelector('a').onclick = function(event) {
    if('isTrusted' in event) {
        if(event.isTrusted === true) {
            console.log('clicked on by a human');
        } else if(event.isTrusted === false) {
            console.log('click was triggered by a script');
        }
    }
};

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTrusted

In IE, all events are trusted except those created by createEvent:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ff974948(v=vs.60)