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.

zicygp

<p>Zicy AI Access Monitor helps site owners understand when known AI crawlers and AI assistant retrieval agents access their WordPress content.</p>
<p>The plugin logs self-identifying AI-related User-Agents, summarizes raw visits into daily totals, and provides an admin dashboard for reviewing AI access patterns across your site. It is designed for AI visibility, AI search optimization, and content monitoring workflows.</p>
<p><strong>What it tracks:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Search crawlers — AI systems that may crawl content for search or answer retrieval workflows, such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot</li>
<li>Training crawlers — AI-related crawlers that may access content for model training or dataset-building workflows, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CohereBot, Mistral-ai, and Meta-WebIndexer</li>
<li>User proxies — AI assistant fetchers that retrieve pages when responding to user requests, such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User, Gemini-Deep-Research, Google-Agent, and BingPreview</li>
<li>AI control agents — AI-related User-Agents such as Google-Extended that may represent AI data-use control behavior rather than ordinary search crawling</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>How it works:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Matching visits are recorded as temporary raw logs.</li>
<li>URLs are normalized to reduce duplicates caused by common tracking parameters.</li>
<li>IP addresses are anonymized by default before being stored.</li>
<li>Each night at 02:15 site time, raw logs older than today are summarized into daily totals.</li>
<li>Raw logs that have been rolled up are deleted.</li>
<li>Daily summary records are retained so you can review historical AI access activity.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>In your WordPress admin dashboard:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>View daily summaries of known AI bot and AI assistant access</li>
<li>See today’s raw logs before the next rollup</li>
<li>Filter by date, bot, type, or signature</li>
<li>Review top pages accessed by AI assistant user proxies</li>
<li>Compare week-over-week activity for top pages</li>
<li>See vendor diversity indicators for accessed pages</li>
<li>Export daily summary data as CSV</li>
<li>Receive weekly email summaries with top accessed pages</li>
<li>Generate copy-ready AI Tracking Briefs for selected pages</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Why it matters:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>See which known AI systems are accessing your content</li>
<li>Identify which pages AI assistants retrieve most often</li>
<li>Support AI search optimization and AI visibility reporting</li>
<li>Understand differences between crawler, training, control, and user-triggered AI access</li>
<li>Build structured page briefs that can be used in AI visibility workflows</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Bot allowlist includes:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>OpenAI: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User</li>
<li>Anthropic: ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot</li>
<li>Perplexity: PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User</li>
<li>Google: Google-Extended, Gemini-Deep-Research, Google-Agent</li>
<li>Microsoft: BingPreview</li>
<li>Amazon: Amazonbot</li>
<li>Common Crawl: CCBot</li>
<li>ByteDance: Bytespider</li>
<li>Cohere: CohereBot</li>
<li>Mistral: Mistral-ai</li>
<li>Meta: Meta-WebIndexer</li>
</ul>
<p>Developers can extend or modify the allowlist with the <code>gp_aibal_ai_bots</code> filter.</p>
<p><strong>Important detection note:</strong></p>
<p>This plugin detects only self-identifying User-Agents. It does not guarantee that every visit is from the claimed company or system, because User-Agent headers can be spoofed. The plugin should be used as a visibility and reporting aid, not as a security or access-control tool.</p>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p>Zicy AI Access Monitor is designed to keep raw request-level data temporary.</p>
<p>The plugin stores matching AI-related access events in your WordPress database, anonymizes IP addresses by default, rolls raw logs into daily summaries, and deletes rolled-up raw logs. Daily summaries are retained for reporting. The plugin does not send logged access data to Zicy or any third-party service.</p>
<p>Site owners are responsible for ensuring that their use of access logging complies with applicable privacy laws and their own privacy policy.</p>


Zicy AI Access Monitor

Monitor known AI crawlers and AI assistant fetches, with daily rollups, CSV exports, weekly summaries, and page briefs.

Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker vs Zicy AI Access Monitor