Freemius

Sajjad Ali

Pagup

<p>Better Robots.txt replaces the default WordPress robots.txt workflow with a smarter, structured version you can configure and preview before publishing.</p>
<p>Instead of a blank textarea, you get a guided wizard with presets, plain-language explanations, and a final Review & Save step so you can inspect the generated robots.txt before it goes live.</p>
<p>Built for beginners and advanced users alike, Better Robots.txt helps you control how search engines, AI crawlers, SEO tools, archive bots, bad bots, social preview bots, and other automated agents interact with your site.</p>
<p>Trusted by thousands of WordPress sites, Better Robots.txt is designed for the AI era without resorting to hype, vague promises, or hidden rules.</p>
<p>Better Robots.txt is available in Free, Pro, and Premium editions. The free plugin covers the guided workflow and essential crawl control features, while Pro and Premium unlock additional governance, protection, and AI-ready modules. Some screenshots on the plugin page show features from all three editions.</p>
<h3>A quick overview</h3>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="Better robots.txt Video — AI-Ready Crawl Control for WordPress" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1169756981?dnt=1&app_id=122963" width="750" height="372" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"></iframe></p>
<h3>Why Better Robots.txt is different</h3>
<p>Most robots.txt plugins fall into one of three categories:</p>
<ul>
<li>Simple text editor</li>
<li>Virtual robots.txt manager</li>
<li>Single-purpose AI or policy add-on</li>
</ul>
<p>Better Robots.txt goes further.</p>
<p>It gives you a complete, guided crawl control workflow so you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Choose a preset that matches your goals</li>
<li>Control major crawler categories without writing everything by hand</li>
<li>Keep core WordPress protection rules visible and editable</li>
<li>Clean up low-value crawl paths that waste crawl budget</li>
<li>Generate a cleaner robots.txt output</li>
<li>Preview the final result before saving</li>
</ul>
<h3>What you can control</h3>
<p>Better Robots.txt helps you manage:</p>
<ul>
<li>Search engine visibility</li>
<li>AI and LLM crawler behavior</li>
<li>AI usage signals such as search, ai-input, and ai-train preferences</li>
<li>SEO tool crawlers</li>
<li>Bad bots and abusive crawlers</li>
<li>Archive and Wayback access</li>
<li>Feed crawlers and crawl traps</li>
<li>WooCommerce crawl cleanup</li>
<li>CSS, JavaScript, and image crawling rules</li>
<li>Social media preview crawlers</li>
<li>ads.txt and app-ads.txt allowance</li>
<li>llms.txt generation</li>
<li>Advanced directives such as crawl-delay and custom rules</li>
<li>Final review before publishing</li>
</ul>
<h3>Editions</h3>
<p>Better Robots.txt is available in three editions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Free – Includes the guided setup, the Essential preset, core crawl control features, and the final Review & Save workflow.</li>
<li>Pro – Adds more advanced governance and protection modules, including additional AI, crawler, and cleanup controls.</li>
<li>Premium – Unlocks the most restrictive and advanced protection options, including the Fortress preset and additional high-control modules.</li>
</ul>
<p>Some options shown in the interface are marked Free, Pro, or Premium so users can immediately understand which modules belong to each edition.</p>
<h3>Presets</h3>
<p>Setup starts with four modes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Essential – A clean, practical configuration for most websites that want a better robots.txt without complexity.</li>
<li>AI-First – For publishers and content sites that want AI-ready governance without shutting down discovery.</li>
<li>Fortress – For websites that want stronger protection against scraping, archive capture, and unnecessary crawl activity.</li>
<li>Custom – For users who prefer to configure each module manually.</li>
</ul>
<p>For many sites, one preset plus a quick review is enough.</p>
<h3>Built for beginners and experts</h3>
<p>Beginners get:</p>
<ul>
<li>A guided setup instead of a raw robots.txt box</li>
<li>Preset-based configuration</li>
<li>Plain-language explanations for important choices</li>
<li>A safer workflow with a final preview step</li>
</ul>
<p>Advanced users get:</p>
<ul>
<li>Editable core WordPress protection rules</li>
<li>Fine-grained crawler controls by category</li>
<li>WooCommerce-oriented cleanup options</li>
<li>Consolidated output options</li>
<li>Advanced directives and custom rules</li>
<li>A final output they can inspect before publishing</li>
</ul>
<h3>AI-ready, without hype</h3>
<p>Better Robots.txt includes features for modern AI-related crawl governance, including:</p>
<ul>
<li>AI crawler handling</li>
<li>Optional llms.txt support</li>
<li>AI usage signals for compliant systems</li>
<li>Optional machine-readable governance signals for advanced use cases</li>
</ul>
<p>These features help you express how you want automated systems to use your content.</p>
<p>However, Better Robots.txt does not claim to control AI by force. Like robots.txt itself, these signals are most useful with compliant systems and good-faith crawlers.</p>
<h3>What Better Robots.txt is</h3>
<p>Better Robots.txt is:</p>
<ul>
<li>A robots.txt governance plugin for WordPress</li>
<li>A guided configuration workflow instead of a raw text editor</li>
<li>A crawl control layer to reduce wasteful crawling</li>
<li>A practical bridge between SEO, crawl hygiene, and AI-era policy signaling</li>
<li>A way to keep your crawl policy clearer for humans and machines</li>
</ul>
<p>Technical reference for advanced users: Better Robots.txt also maintains a public <a href="https://github.com/GautierDorval/better-robots-txt" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer ugc">GitHub repository</a> with product definition, governance notes, and machine-readable artefacts.</p>
<h3>What Better Robots.txt is not</h3>
<p>Better Robots.txt is not:</p>
<ul>
<li>A firewall or Web Application Firewall (WAF)</li>
<li>An anti-scraping enforcement engine</li>
<li>A legal compliance engine</li>
<li>A guarantee that every bot will obey your rules</li>
<li>A replacement for server-level security or access control</li>
</ul>
<p>It helps you publish a clearer crawl policy.</p>
<p>It does not replace infrastructure-level protection.</p>
<h3>Typical use cases</h3>
<p>Use Better Robots.txt if you want to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Clean up a weak or noisy default robots.txt</li>
<li>Reduce crawl waste on WordPress or WooCommerce</li>
<li>Keep major search engines allowed while restricting other bots</li>
<li>Control whether archive bots can snapshot your site</li>
<li>Publish AI usage preferences more clearly</li>
<li>Keep social preview bots allowed while limiting scrapers</li>
<li>Review the final file before making it live</li>
</ul>
<h3>Key Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>Guided step-by-step wizard</li>
<li>Preset-based setup: Essential, AI-First, Fortress, Custom</li>
<li>Search engine visibility controls</li>
<li>AI and LLM crawler governance</li>
<li>AI usage signals support</li>
<li>SEO tool crawler controls</li>
<li>Bad bot and abusive crawler options</li>
<li>Archive and Wayback access controls</li>
<li>Spam, feed, and crawl trap cleanup</li>
<li>WooCommerce crawl cleanup options</li>
<li>CSS, JavaScript, and image crawling rules</li>
<li>Social media preview crawler controls</li>
<li>ads.txt and app-ads.txt allowance</li>
<li>Optional llms.txt generation</li>
<li>Consolidated output option</li>
<li>Core WordPress protection rules remain visible and editable</li>
<li>Final Review & Save preview screen</li>
</ul>
<h4>About the publisher</h4>
<p>Better Robots.txt is developed and maintained by <a href="https://pagup.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Pagup</a>, a digital readability firm based in Quebec, Canada. Pagup helps organizations become correctly understood by search engines, generative AI systems, and autonomous agents.</p>
<p>The robots.txt file is the first surface that AI crawlers read when they discover a site. A well-structured robots.txt that references governance files such as llms.txt, ai-manifest.json, and interpretation policies helps AI systems understand your site faster and more accurately.</p>
<p>Better Robots.txt is one component of a broader digital readability practice that includes <a href="https://pagup.com/en/services/semantic-content-architecture/" rel="nofollow ugc">semantic content architecture</a>, <a href="https://pagup.com/en/services/ai-governance-and-machine-readability/" rel="nofollow ugc">AI governance and machine readability</a>, and <a href="https://pagup.com/en/glossary/interpretive-seo/" rel="nofollow ugc">interpretive SEO</a>.</p>
<h4>Part of the Pagup ecosystem</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://pagup.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">pagup.com</a> — Digital readability firm. Diagnostic, semantic architecture, AI governance.</li>
<li><a href="https://gautierdorval.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">gautierdorval.com</a> — Doctrine, canonical definitions, interpretive governance research.</li>
<li><a href="https://interpretive-governance.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">interpretive-governance.org</a> — Formal versioned standard for interpretive governance.</li>
<li><a href="https://better-robots.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">better-robots.com</a> — Documentation and resources for Better Robots.txt.</li>
</ul>


Better Robots.txt – AI-Ready Crawl Control & Bot Governance

Replace the default WordPress robots.txt workflow with a smarter, structured version you can preview before publishing, with Free, Pro, and Premium ed …

Smalker001

<p><strong>See the AI agents and AI Search visitors your site actually receives — and never lose an event again.</strong></p>
<p>The web is shifting from search results to answer engines. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and dozens of other AI crawlers visit your pages every day, and a growing share of your human traffic now arrives from an AI assistant rather than a classic SERP. Most analytics tools were built for the old web and miss all of it.</p>
<p>Smalk AI Analytics adds an AI-aware tracking layer to your WordPress site: every public-page visit (AI agent OR human-from-AI-search) is captured, classified, and pushed to your Smalk dashboard where you can see which engines cite you, which pages they prefer, and how that AI exposure converts into real human traffic.</p>
<p>Unlike crawler-blocking plugins, Smalk does <strong>not</strong> block AI bots. It helps you measure, optimize, and turn AI exposure into growth.</p>
<h3>KEY FEATURES</h3>
<p><em>Tracking</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Real-time capture of AI agent visits (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GeminiBot, GoogleOther, OAI-SearchBot, Mistral, AppleBot-Extended, and 30+ others) plus human visitors arriving from AI search engines.</li>
<li>Two tracking layers: a lightweight hook captures bot traffic (which never executes JavaScript) AND a <code>tracker.js</code> snippet captures human session context. Both feed the same Smalk dashboard.</li>
<li>Rich proxy header capture (Cloudflare, geo, X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, X-Smalk-CMS) so bot classification stays accurate even behind CDNs.</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Reliability (new in 1.1.0)</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Local MySQL queue buffers visits when the Smalk API is briefly unreachable — no more lost events during transient outages.</li>
<li>Background cron flushes the queue every minute via a batched endpoint (up to 500 visits per request).</li>
<li>Built-in circuit breaker pauses outbound calls after repeated failures and resumes automatically.</li>
<li>Per-row exponential-backoff retry + daily cleanup of stale entries.</li>
<li>“Direct” fallback mode for sites that prefer the old fire-and-forget behavior (no queue table).</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Privacy & compliance</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Per-site <strong>redact list</strong> for query parameters (passwords, tokens, credit-card and SSN-style keys are redacted by default before any value leaves your server).</li>
<li><strong>Deny-paths</strong> textarea with wildcards on top of a strict built-in exclusion list (<code>/wp-admin</code>, <code>/wp-login</code>, <code>/wp-json</code>, <code>/xmlrpc.php</code>, REST API calls, favicon, etc.).</li>
<li>Per-request-type skip toggles (admin / cron / AJAX / REST) — admin / cron / AJAX skipped by default.</li>
<li>No cookies are set on visitors.</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Admin experience</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Modern card-based settings page with a 4-tile <strong>Status & Diagnostics</strong> panel: queue size, last successful send, circuit-breaker state, last error — refreshed live on every action.</li>
<li>One-click <strong>Send test event</strong> (probes the Smalk API with a <code>X-Smalk-Probe: 1</code> header so the test never appears in your real analytics), <strong>Force-flush queue now</strong>, <strong>Resume sending</strong> (reset circuit breaker), and <strong>Clear page caches</strong> (purges WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, Autoptimize, WP Super Cache, Hummingbird, FlyingPress, SG Optimizer, WP Fastest Cache, Cache Enabler, WP Engine, plus the WordPress object cache and PHP OPcache).</li>
<li>Auto-save when you paste a new API key — no scrolling to “Save changes”.</li>
<li><strong>Debug report</strong> generator: collects plugin version, queue + sender stats, cron schedules, detected cache plugins, live connectivity probes, and active plugins into a single text blob you can email to support — never dumps raw <code>error_log</code> (no risk of leaking unrelated secrets).</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Performance</em></p>
<ul>
<li><code><link rel="preconnect"></code> + <code><link rel="dns-prefetch"></code> for the tracker origin before the async script tag — saves ~50–150 ms TLS+DNS handshake on cold connections (mostly mobile / first-time visitors).</li>
<li>Tracker JS auto-excluded from 10+ caching/minify plugins (WP Rocket, Autoptimize, W3TC, LiteSpeed, SG Optimizer, Hummingbird, FlyingPress, Asset CleanUp, …) so caching never strips it.</li>
<li>Zero impact on TTFB: every flavor of outbound call is either non-blocking (direct mode) or deferred to cron (queued mode, the default).</li>
</ul>
<h3>WHY CHOOSE SMALK AI</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>See AI traffic accurately.</strong> Most analytics drop AI agents entirely (they don’t run JS); Smalk catches them and classifies them in real time.</li>
<li><strong>Never lose an event.</strong> The queued mode keeps tracking your site even when our API is briefly unreachable.</li>
<li><strong>Privacy-first defaults.</strong> Sensitive query parameters are redacted, admin / cron / AJAX requests are skipped, no cookies on visitors.</li>
<li><strong>No bot blocking.</strong> Smalk helps you grow your AI footprint, not shrink it.</li>
<li><strong>Plays nicely with every host and cache.</strong> Tested on WP 5.0 / PHP 7.0 through WP 6.9 / PHP 8.3. Auto-detects and works around the major caching / minify plugins.</li>
</ul>
<h3>EXTERNAL SERVICES</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to Smalk AI’s API services for analytics and tracking functionality. The following data transmissions occur:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Analytics Tracking:</p>
<ul>
<li>The plugin sends website visit data to api.smalk.ai when AI agents visit your site</li>
<li>Data sent includes: visit information, page URLs, and user agent data</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<p>Project Configuration:</p>
<ul>
<li>The plugin connects to the Smalk API to retrieve project settings when the API key is saved or updated</li>
<li>Project data is cached locally and reused — no API calls are made on page loads</li>
<li>Only authenticated API requests are made using your project key</li>
<li>No personal user data is transmitted during these requests</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>For more information about our data handling practices, please visit:<br />
– Terms of Service: https://smalkapp.notion.site/Terms-of-service-Smalk-9f047b4200b84b70a4fb38142cfb5799<br />
– Privacy Policy: https://smalkapp.notion.site/Privacy-Policy-Smalk-08a503612b3e481596b0a434e96dd7c1?pvs=74</p>


Smalk AI Analytics

Real-time analytics on AI agents and AI Search visitors — see who from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews actually reaches your  …

Better Robots.txt – AI-Ready Crawl Control & Bot Governance vs Smalk AI Analytics