crawlantix

<p>Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker monitors visits from 30+ AI crawlers and gives you visibility into how bots interact with your site. See which bots visit, what pages they crawl, and catch misbehaving bots with a built-in logging-only honeypot. Lightweight, privacy-first, and fully functional out of the box.</p>
<p><strong>Free forever — no artificial limits on bot detection.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Tracked Bots (30+):</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>GPTBot / ChatGPT-User / OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)</li>
<li>ClaudeBot / Claude-Web / anthropic-ai (Anthropic)</li>
<li>Googlebot / Google-Extended (Google / Gemini)</li>
<li>bingbot (Microsoft / Copilot)</li>
<li>PerplexityBot (Perplexity)</li>
<li>DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba), Mistral AI</li>
<li>Applebot-Extended (Apple Intelligence)</li>
<li>Meta-ExternalAgent (Meta AI)</li>
<li>Bytespider (ByteDance)</li>
<li>CCBot (Common Crawl), Amazonbot, YouBot, DuckDuckBot</li>
<li>AI2Bot, Diffbot, Timpibot, PetalBot</li>
<li>SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, DataForSeoBot, MJ12bot, DotBot</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Features:</strong></p>
<h4>Lightweight Bot Detection (30+ Bots)</h4>
<p>Hooks into WordPress <code>init</code> with a priority-1 action. Bails immediately on non-AI User-Agents — zero performance cost for human visitors. All 30+ bots tracked.</p>
<h4>Dashboard with Charts</h4>
<p>Clean dashboard with trend chart and provider breakdown pie chart (Chart.js, bundled locally). Summary cards show total visits, unique bots, pages crawled, and daily averages. No external dependencies.</p>
<h4>Bot Activity Table</h4>
<p>Dedicated tab showing all detected bots with visits, bytes transferred, 24h sparklines, verification status, and honeypot hit counts.</p>
<h4>Crawled Pages</h4>
<p>See which pages bots visit most, which bots crawl them, and when they were last seen.</p>
<h4>Honeypot Endpoint (Logging Only)</h4>
<p>A CSS-hidden, aria-hidden, rel=nofollow link is injected in the footer. Only raw link-extracting bots will follow it. Visits are logged for transparency. Active defense (blocking, tarpit, rate-limit, decoy, shadowban) is reserved for the paid build.</p>
<h4>Bot Verification</h4>
<p>Reverse DNS (FCrDNS) verification for major bots — confirms Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc. are actually who they claim to be.</p>
<h4>Privacy First</h4>
<p>IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a per-install salt before storage. Raw IPs are never saved. Includes WordPress Privacy API exporter and eraser hooks so data-subject access and erasure requests can flow through the standard WordPress Tools <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Personal Data workflow.</p>
<h4>AI Discovery Layer</h4>
<p>Serves <code>ai-plugin.json</code> (a discovery manifest that tells visiting AI agents the site is monitored) and <code>llms.txt</code> / <code>llms-full.txt</code> (text content authored by the admin via WordPress pages with slugs <code>llms-txt</code> and <code>llms-full-txt</code>) at the site root.</p>
<h4>Data Retention</h4>
<p>Bot visit data is retained for 30 days. Older records are automatically pruned via WP-Cron.</p>
<h3>External Services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to the following external services:</p>
<h4>Reverse DNS Lookups</h4>
<p>The bot verification feature performs reverse DNS (FCrDNS) lookups using PHP’s <code>gethostbyaddr()</code> and <code>gethostbyname()</code> functions to verify that bots are who they claim to be (e.g., confirming a request claiming to be Googlebot actually originates from Google’s network). These lookups send the bot’s IP address to your server’s configured DNS resolver and the authoritative DNS servers for the IP address’s reverse DNS zone. Under some privacy regimes, IP addresses may be considered personal data. This feature runs automatically when a known AI bot visits your site and cannot currently be disabled via the admin UI (a filter hook <code>crawlantix_enable_verification</code> is available for developers).</p>
<p>No other external services, third-party APIs, or remote requests are used by this plugin. All analytics data is stored locally in your WordPress database. Chart.js is bundled locally — no CDN requests are made.</p>
<h3>Privacy Policy</h3>
<p>Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker is designed with privacy as a core principle:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Bot traffic only.</strong> The plugin only tracks automated bot traffic identified by User-Agent strings. Human visitors are not tracked and no cookies are set.</li>
<li><strong>No raw IP addresses stored.</strong> All IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a per-install random salt before storage (or AUTH_SALT when defined in <code>wp-config.php</code>). The original IP address cannot be recovered from the hash. Note: pseudonymous IP hashes may still be considered personal data under GDPR.</li>
<li><strong>Data stored per bot visit:</strong> IP hash, User-Agent string, requested URL, HTTP referrer URL, request method, timestamp, and derived fields (bytes transferred, bot verification status). Referrer URLs may contain personal data depending on the referring site.</li>
<li><strong>WordPress Privacy API integration.</strong> The plugin registers exporter and eraser callbacks with WordPress core, so data-subject access and erasure requests filed through Tools <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Personal Data flow correctly.</li>
<li><strong>No external data transmission.</strong> All analytics data remains in your local WordPress database. No data is sent to Crawlantix or third-party services. The only external communication is DNS lookups for bot verification (see External Services above).</li>
<li><strong>Data retention controls.</strong> Bot visit data is automatically pruned after 30 days. Administrators can delete all collected data on uninstall via the “Delete Data on Uninstall” Settings toggle.</li>
</ul>
<p>For sites that require a formal privacy policy disclosure, you may note: “We use the Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker plugin to monitor automated AI bot traffic to our site. This plugin records bot User-Agent strings, pseudonymous IP hashes, pages visited, referrer URLs, and timestamps for detected bot traffic only. Raw IP addresses are cryptographically hashed before storage. No human visitor data is collected.”</p>
<h3>Premium Version</h3>
<p>Crawlantix also offers paid tiers at <a href="https://crawlantix.com" rel="nofollow ugc">crawlantix.com</a> for site owners who need active bot defense in addition to monitoring. The paid build adds the following features on top of everything in this free version:</p>
<h4>Protect tier</h4>
<ul>
<li>Active honeypot responses: HTTP 403 block, tarpit (random 5–25s delay with worker-exhaustion safeguards), rate limit 429, decoy content, shadowban.</li>
<li>Auto-block of repeat honeypot offenders, with configurable thresholds.</li>
<li>Per-IP response rules — apply a chosen response strategy to specific IP hashes (up to 200 rules).</li>
<li>Custom honeypot paths (up to 5) with a reserved-route safety list.</li>
<li>Email alerts for honeypot hits and parameter explosion patterns.</li>
<li>Robots.txt trap entries that catch non-compliant scrapers.</li>
<li>Optional override that suppresses the WordPress core <code>/wp/v2/users</code> REST endpoints (username-enumeration hardening, off by default and easy to opt back in).</li>
</ul>
<h4>Optimize tier</h4>
<ul>
<li>Full REST API at <code>/wp-json/ai-tracker/v1/</code> with API key authentication and 13 endpoints (status, stats, page, trends, bots, top-pages, report, export, alerts, honeypot, crawled-pages, etc.).</li>
<li>GeoIP location tracking with MaxMind GeoLite2.</li>
<li>Crawl Analytics tab with deeper traffic-quality metrics.</li>
<li>Extended data retention up to 365 days.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Scale tier</h4>
<ul>
<li>Backup & restore — export all data as JSON; import with merge or replace modes.</li>
<li>Unlimited retention.</li>
<li>Priority support.</li>
</ul>
<p>The paid build is a drop-in upgrade: same plugin slug, same database tables, same option keys, so all your historical bot data carries over with no migration step on your part.</p>


Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker

Track 30+ AI crawlers visiting your site with real-time dashboards, logging-only honeypot, and bot verification.

bentannenbaum

<p>Search is moving inside AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI a question, those assistants quietly fetch real web pages — and <strong>those fetches are the new impressions</strong>. Most analytics tools never show them, because AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript and don’t appear in client-side analytics.</p>
<p><strong>Aiso AI Crawler Analytics reads the requests that actually hit your server</strong> and turns them into a clean, agency-ready dashboard right inside wp-admin. Think of it as the “AI visibility” companion to your security log — focused entirely on AI search performance instead of threats.</p>
<h4>What you get</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Headline KPIs</strong> — total AI-crawler hits, “chat impressions” (live fetches during AI answers), distinct crawlers, and pages crawled.</li>
<li><strong>By AI platform</strong> — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, Google/Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and more.</li>
<li><strong>By crawler / user-agent</strong> — the exact bots (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, Bytespider, Applebot…).</li>
<li><strong>By purpose</strong> — training vs. citation-indexing vs. <strong>live chat impressions</strong> vs. search vs. agentic browsing, so you know whether a bot is just training a model or actively quoting you in an answer.</li>
<li><strong>By page</strong> — which URLs AI assistants read most, with per-page impression counts.</li>
<li><strong>Over time</strong> — a daily activity chart so you can see trends and spikes.</li>
<li><strong>Live hit log</strong> — recent crawler visits with country and a source-IP verification badge that flags possible spoofed user-agents.</li>
<li><strong>CSV export</strong> — hand clients a report in one click.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Built for agencies</h4>
<p>Connect the plugin to a free Aiso account and every site you manage reports into one central place, so your AI-visibility data is kept long-term and viewable across your whole portfolio. Not an agency? The plugin works completely on its own — install it and the dashboard fills up locally with <strong>nothing sent anywhere</strong>.</p>
<h4>Privacy-first</h4>
<p>Visitor IPs are anonymised by default (stored only as a salted hash). The plugin records AI-crawler requests, not your human visitors, and never transmits any data externally until you explicitly connect an Aiso account.</p>
<h3>External services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to the Aiso API (https://www.getaiso.com) <strong>only when you enable syncing by connecting an account</strong>. It is used to (a) optionally generate an API key for your site and (b) store your AI-crawler hits centrally so they are retained long-term and can be viewed across multiple sites.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>When data is sent:</strong> only while “Send data to Aiso” is enabled in Settings, and only for AI-crawler hits (not human visitors).</li>
<li><strong>What is sent:</strong> the requested path and URL, the crawler’s user-agent, the detected bot and company, an optionally-hashed source IP, a two-letter country code, the HTTP status, a timestamp, your site URL, and your Aiso API key.</li>
<li><strong>What is not sent:</strong> human-visitor analytics, post content, or personal data of your readers.</li>
</ul>
<p>By connecting an account you agree to Aiso’s terms and privacy policy:</p>
<ul>
<li>Terms: https://www.getaiso.com/quick_links/terms_of_service</li>
<li>Privacy policy: https://www.getaiso.com/quick_links/privacy_policy</li>
</ul>
<p>If you never connect an account, the plugin makes no external requests and stores all data locally on your own server.</p>


Aiso AI Crawler Analytics

See which AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and more — crawl your site, broken down by assistant, crawler, purpose and page.

Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker vs Aiso AI Crawler Analytics