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.

Log Hero

<h4>Log-Hero.com</h4>
Do you want to understand how bots crawl your website? Log Hero helps you track and visualize bots, spiders, and crawlers by making them visible in real time in your Google Analytics account so that you can analyze them like human visitors.
His additional dimensions and metrics help you analyze the bot data even better. Using Log Hero, you won’t have to fetch your server logs and analyze them in a lousy UI. From now on, your logs are available in real-time in Google Analytics.
<h4>Data that you can monitor in Google Analytics</h4>
<ul>
<li>Page path of your crawled sites (see how often a bot crawls sites).</li>
<li>User agent (how the bot identifies himself).</li>
<li>IP addresses (only for bots, so 100% GDPR and privacy compliant).</li>
<li>Sessions and users (monitor bots and their flow as if they were human visitors).</li>
<li>HTTP status codes (monitor status codes of individual sites, find broken links, redirect chains, server failures).</li>
<li>Download times (how long the bot needs to download your content).</li>
<li>[Premium] Device category (which device category the bot used. I.e., see whether Google crawled you with the mobile or desktop bot).</li>
<li>[Premium] Bot name (Using user agent and the IP address, we check whether the bot is whom he claims he is).</li>
<li>[Premium] Request method (see what request method (PUT or GET) bots used on your site).</li>
<li>[Premium] Referral / channel (analyze through which links bots came to your site to crawl you).</li>
<li>[Premium] Location (see where the visitor or bot is from).</li>
<li>[Premium] IsBot (see at a first glance whether it’s a bot or a human).</li>
<li>[Premium] Spam detection (check how many spam bots visit your site and what type they are).</li>
<li>[Premium] Attack detection (get a warning if someone tries to attack or hack your site).</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
Note: some of those features are premium features. They are only available in paid plans. You can <a href="https://log-hero.com" rel="nofollow ugc">get them here</a>!
</blockquote>
<h4>Analysis in Google Analytics</h4>
All data is safely stored in your Google Analytics account and available even if you won’t continue using Log Hero.
<ul>
<li>Easy filtering of your data in Google Analytics (works with regular expressions, too).</li>
<li>Advanced and fast segment analysis.</li>
<li>Real-time monitoring of your data.</li>
<li>Easy exporting of your data as Excel, CSV, or Google Sheets.</li>
<li>Analysis of large data sets through Google Analytics’ API.</li>
<li>Easy setup of dashboards and alerts.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Monitoring critical technical issues</h4>
Log Hero helps you to identify many issues concerning technical optimization of your site and can derive quick action items to resolve these.
<ul>
<li>Which bots crawl my site and how often?</li>
<li>Which orphan pages has my site that are never crawled?</li>
<li>Which status codes does my site return to search engines?</li>
<li>Are my robots.txt and sitemap.xml crawled by search engine bots?</li>
<li>Do search engine bots crawl my page with a desktop or mobile device?</li>
<li>How long does the bot need to download the resources of my site?</li>
<li>How many users does my normal Google Analytics system not track because they have disabled the tracker or Javascript?</li>
<li>and much more. Visit <a href="https://log-hero.com" rel="nofollow ugc">log-hero.com</a>! for more information</li>
</ul>
<h3>Bug reports</h3>
Bug reports for Log Hero are <a href="https://github.com/LogHero/lh-wp-plugin/issues" rel="nofollow ugc">appreciated on GitHub</a>. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum, and issues that aren’t adequately qualified as bugs are closed.
<h3>Further Reading</h3>
For more information about logs or this plugin, visit the <a href="https://log-hero.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Log-Hero</a> homepage.

Log-Hero.com Plugin

Cool stuff I can exactly see my Logs in Analytics and check if the Googlebot is crawling my page correct.

Funny: Interesting how many Attacks on my Page I can see

Logs in GA - Yeah

Analyze how search engines and other bots crawl and understand your web page. The official PHP Wordpress plugin for log-hero.com.

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager vs Log-Hero.com Plugin