Jon Henshaw

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager turns robots.txt into a managed list of rules you build from the WordPress admin — no FTP, no hand-editing. It ships the full catalog of bots from the Cloudflare Bot Directory, grouped by category (AI Crawler, Search Engine Crawler, Advertising, Security, and more), so you can disallow whole categories of unwanted bots with a click.
<ul>
<li>Rules table — every directive as a row with a name and plain-English description, with bulk delete and pagination. Identical directives are consolidated.</li>
<li>Direct editor — a Robots.txt page shows the current file in an editable box; saving re-parses and optimizes your hand edits into managed rules. A copy button puts the whole robots.txt on your clipboard.</li>
<li>Guided rule editor — choose a Rule Type (Disallow or Allow) and a Rule Path (folder, prefix, file type, query string, allow-exception, and more); the editor builds the correct directive, with auto-filled name and description, plus a URL testing tool.</li>
<li>Conflict checking — every add or edit is checked against existing rules; if it duplicates or contradicts one, the editor explains the clash and won’t save until it’s resolved.</li>
<li>Bot catalog — every bot from the Cloudflare Bot Directory, plus a curated set of well-known AI crawlers it doesn’t list yet (ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and more), grouped by category, with select-all per category. The catalog ships with the plugin and is refreshed through plugin updates.</li>
<li>Curated robots.txt tokens — the exact User-agent token each bot obeys is curated for all 600+ bots (the directory’s own match data is often a URL, operator name, or generic word), so rules block the right token and imported robots.txt files match the right bot.</li>
<li>Commented output — each rule is written as its own section prefixed with a comment carrying its name and description; a rule’s bots are stacked under User-agent: lines with the directive written once.</li>
<li>Physical or virtual — write a real robots.txt in your site root, or let WordPress serve it virtually. On install, an existing physical file is detected, managed, and imported automatically.</li>
<li>Backup & restore — your original robots.txt is captured before the plugin reads, parses, or rewrites anything; on deactivation it asks whether to restore that original or keep the rules it built (markers removed).</li>
<li>Import & export — on the Import / Export Rules page, download all rules and settings preferences as one JSON file, then import it to restore them or copy the setup to another site. Import replaces the current rules; sitemap URLs aren’t included (they’re site-specific).</li>
<li>Optional comments — the per-rule description comments can be excluded from robots.txt under Settings → Rule comments, and added back any time.</li>
<li>Role-based access — under Settings → Access, choose which user roles can see and use the plugin; Administrator is always allowed and can’t be locked out. Only administrators can change the access list and the serving mode.</li>
<li>Cleans up on import — fixes misspelled directives, missing colons, and missing leading slashes; consolidates duplicate user-agent groups and resolves Allow/Disallow conflicts; strips deprecated/unsupported directives (Crawl-delay, Noindex, Nofollow, Host, Request-rate, Visit-time); removes render-blocking /.css and /.js blocks and the overly broad /wp-content/; fixes malformed wildcards; and makes Sitemap links absolute and de-duplicated, dropping any that point at a different domain (also handles a UTF-8 BOM and Google’s 500 KiB limit).</li>
<li>XML sitemaps — add sitemap URLs under Settings → XML sitemaps (written at the end of robots.txt), or exclude sitemap links entirely.</li>
<li>Owns the virtual robots.txt — in virtual mode the plugin serves the whole file. WordPress’s own default rules (Disallow: /wp-admin/) are imported and reconciled into your managed rules when you activate or switch to virtual (WordPress’s rules win, so its “*” rule absorbs a matching per-bot rule), and WordPress stops adding a duplicate block on top. Other SEO plugins’ additions (e.g. Yoast) are excluded too. Physical mode is served by WordPress directly.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Conflict resolution</h3>
When rules are imported, or you hand-edit the Robots.txt page and save, the plugin re-parses everything and resolves conflicts automatically with opinionated, deterministic decisions:
<ul>
<li>Identical directives that differ only by user-agent are consolidated into one rule listing every agent; duplicate User-agent groups are merged case-insensitively.</li>
<li>When an agent both allows and disallows the same path, the later rule wins, and a blanket Disallow: / is dropped for an agent that has more specific rules.</li>
<li>If a directive applies to * as well as named bots for the same path, it collapses to just * (the wildcard already covers them).</li>
<li>In virtual mode WordPress’s own User-agent: * base rules (the /wp-admin/ block) win and absorb any matching per-bot rule, and are served once instead of duplicated on top.</li>
<li>Deprecated/unsupported directives are removed (Crawl-delay, Noindex, Nofollow, Host, Request-rate, Visit-time).</li>
<li>SEO-harmful blocks are removed (render-blocking /.css and /.js, and the overly broad /wp-content/).</li>
<li>Syntax is repaired (misspelled directives, a missing colon, a missing leading slash, malformed wildcards).</li>
<li>Sitemap links are made absolute and de-duplicated (preferring https); cross-domain ones are dropped; a UTF-8 BOM is stripped and Google’s 500 KiB limit is honored.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Bot tokens</h3>
Blocking a bot only works if robots.txt uses the exact User-agent token that bot obeys. The bundled Cloudflare Bot Directory isn’t reliable for this — its match data is often a URL, the operator’s name, or a generic word like “Bot” — so every one of the 600+ bots has a curated robots.txt token, researched against each operator’s documentation and the product token in its real user-agent (e.g. Toutiao → Bytespider, Internet Archive → archive.org_bot, BrightEdge Bot → BrightEdge). Each entry records the variant spellings that should map to it, so importing an existing robots.txt matches the right catalog bot. The tokens are bundled with the plugin and kept current through plugin updates. Bots that publish no robots.txt-targetable token (e.g. “signed agents” that identify cryptographically) are left out of the list, since robots.txt can’t target them.

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager

Manage robots.txt from the WordPress admin: build rules, block bots by category, and serve a physical or virtual robots.txt.

Known Agents

Track crawlers, scrapers, LLM assistants, and AI agents on your website. Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI bots. Formerly Dark Visitors.
<h3>Track, control, and optimize your website for AI agents and bots</h3>
You have <a href="https://knownagents.com/insights" rel="nofollow ugc">40% more visitors than you think</a>. Protect your content from unwanted AI scraping, and turn the rising wave of AI agents, LLM assistants, and other bots visiting your website into a new growth channel for your business. For full details, visit the <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Known Agents</a> website.
<h3>1. AI Agent & Bot Analytics</h3>
Get realtime visibility into the hidden ecosystem of crawlers, scrapers, and AI agents browsing your website
<ul>
<li>Watch traffic from crawlers and scrapers as it happens: Track the hidden activity of <a href="https://knownagents.com/agents" rel="nofollow ugc">all known artificial agents</a> visiting your website in real time.</li>
<li>Replay AI agent navigation patterns: Follow a single agent’s session as it navigates your website. Find where agents get stuck, identify dead ends, and help them complete their tasks.</li>
<li>Catch bots spoofing legitimate agents: Identify bad actors and unauthorized scrapers pretending to be legitimate agents like Googlebot or Bingbot.</li>
<li>Never miss a bot traffic spike: Stay informed when an agent’s traffic starts surging or overloading your server.</li>
<li>Reveal which agents visit most, and which pages they target: Break down bot traffic by page to understand what they’re interested in.</li>
<li>Export reports to CSV: Download agent activity reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>2. LLM Citation & Referral Tracking (GEO, AEO)</h3>
Measure citations and human click-throughs from AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
<ul>
<li>Increase citations in AI chat responses: See which pages LLMs recommend most often. Double down on content that’s working.</li>
<li>Find out which AI platforms are sending you traffic: Measure how many humans are clicking through to your website from a citation.</li>
<li>Export reports to CSV: Download LLM referral reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>3. Automatic Robots.txt & Bad Bot Detection</h3>
Protect your content and reduce server cost by serving a robots.txt that updates continuously
<ul>
<li>Set robots.txt rules for entire categories of bots: Control access for entire agent categories including AI crawlers, scrapers, SEO bots, and more. One selection covers every current and future agent in that group.</li>
<li>We track new bots, you don’t have to: Your robots.txt is updated as new agents emerge, so you never have to manage them yourself or make manual edits.</li>
<li>Block misbehaving crawlers and scrapers: Detect and block bots that ignore your robots.txt rules using the WordPress plugin, or our automation detectors.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Demos</h3>
Demos can be found on the <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">home page</a>.
<h3>Further Details</h3>
This plugin connects your website to <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Known Agents</a>. It uses the Known Agents API to connect to your account and provide functionality.
By signing up, you agree to the <a href="https://knownagents.com/terms-of-service" rel="nofollow ugc">Terms of Service</a> and <a href="https://knownagents.com/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a>.
Are you finding this plugin useful? Please <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/dark-visitors/reviews/#new-post" rel="ugc">leave us a ★★★★★ review</a>! Questions or issues? <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/dark-visitors/" rel="ugc">Ask us for help</a>.

Known Agents – Track AI Bots and Crawlers, Block Scrapers, Analyze LLM Referral Traffic


Please remind me in a month to provide an update on the performance of this plugin on a heavily visited website.


Begun my review...


An easy improvement would be to link to the settings page from the plugin entry like other plugins, other than that, in general this plugin and its online dashboard is generally well thought out and useful. My website is small and has limited resources that get overrun by crawlers making it unavailable. This plugin helps identify the culprits and decide if I should block them or not. For free you can block them in robots.txt, as I have a physical file, the plugin won't touch that but its easy to add manually. It will report those crawlers that ignore the robots file and the paid version will enforce those rules, but I just update ".htaccess" myself.



I'm reducing my rating by a star since you won't get much "Agent Analytics" (per month) and for my tiny site it quickly ran out, we are a NFP so don't have money to burn on subscriptions.  The the description for the plan incorrectly states "Unlimited Agent Analytics" when the plan only includes 100,000 events.


Very Useful Plugin


Very good: shows all bot-crawlers.Our website was sometimes down due to bot-crawlers, with this tool it is easy to solve. Very good logging of bots.This was the only good plugin I could find for this purpose.Some bots ignore robots.txt. So I manually changed htaccess, that worked very good.


Very very helpful

Track crawlers, scrapers, LLM assistants, and AI agents on your website. Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI bots. Formerly Dark Visitors.

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager vs Known Agents – Track AI Bots and Crawlers, Block Scrapers, Analyze LLM Referral Traffic