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.

senols

PufferSights monitors 100+ known AI crawler and AI agent user agents, hashes IP addresses, groups traffic by bot, provider, crawl purpose, content type, and response status, tracks human referrals from AI surfaces, and can publish a dynamic llms.txt content map for public site content.
The dashboard summarizes:
<ul>
<li>HTTP traffic by bot.</li>
<li>Crawl purpose.</li>
<li>Content type.</li>
<li>Response status.</li>
<li>AI referrals and crawl-to-refer ratio.</li>
<li>Top crawled content.</li>
<li>Tracked agent count.</li>
<li>Dynamic llms.txt content map.</li>
<li>robots.txt audit and policy snippets.</li>
</ul>
The crawler registry is based on current public operator documentation and industry references for OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Common Crawl, Meta, ByteDance, Microsoft, Amazon, and related AI crawler operators.
The plugin does not contact any external service. All analytics data is stored in your own WordPress database.
robots.txt publishing is off by default. The plugin can generate and optionally publish policies for:
<ul>
<li>Monitor only.</li>
<li>Block training crawlers.</li>
<li>Allow AI search/user-action bots while blocking training crawlers.</li>
<li>Block all known AI bots.</li>
</ul>
llms.txt publishing is on by default and can be disabled in the PufferSights settings. The generated <code>/llms.txt</code> file lists selected published public pages and posts in Markdown so AI assistants can find the site’s main public content more easily.
<h3>Important Notes</h3>
User-agent detection is not bot verification. User agents can be spoofed. Raw IP addresses are not stored; the plugin stores a salted hash for rough uniqueness.
robots.txt is voluntary. Use a WAF, CDN, or server-level controls when technical enforcement is required.
Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are robots.txt control tokens rather than normal request user agents, so they appear in robots.txt audits and policy snippets but usually do not appear in request logs.
llms.txt is a content map, not an access-control policy. It does not replace robots.txt and does not force AI systems to use or cite your content.
<h3>Privacy</h3>
PufferSights stores local analytics for public, logged-out requests only. It does not track wp-admin pages, logged-in users, AJAX requests, or WP-Cron requests.
The plugin stores:
<ul>
<li>Request time and date.</li>
<li>Event type, such as AI crawler request or AI referral.</li>
<li>HTTP method.</li>
<li>Request path without query string.</li>
<li>HTTP response status.</li>
<li>MIME/content group.</li>
<li>Matched crawler or AI referral provider.</li>
<li>User-agent string and user-agent hash.</li>
<li>Salted one-way hash of the request IP address.</li>
<li>Referrer origin only, such as <code>https://chatgpt.com</code>, without referrer path or query string.</li>
</ul>
The plugin does not store raw IP addresses, cookies, browser local storage, or complete referrer URLs. It does not send analytics, telemetry, crawler records, or site data to third-party services.
If llms.txt publishing is enabled, the plugin serves a Markdown overview of selected published public posts and pages at <code>/llms.txt</code>. Drafts, private posts, and password-protected posts are not included.
Administrators can disable tracking, clear captured events, and configure retention from the PufferSights admin page. The default retention period is 90 days. On uninstall, the plugin removes its custom analytics table, saved options, and scheduled cleanup hook.
The plugin also adds suggested disclosure text to WordPress’ Privacy Policy Guide.

PufferSights – AI Crawler Insights

Monitor 100+ known AI crawler and AI agent user agents with local analytics, AI referrals, llms.txt, and opt-in robots.txt policy tools.

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager vs PufferSights – AI Crawler Insights