phalkmin

ParseLess serves your WordPress content as clean Markdown to AI crawlers (via User-Agent detection) and on manual <code>?format=md</code> requests. Same URL, same content, none of the theme chrome, navigation, widgets, or page-builder scaffolding that AI bots and CLI tools don’t need.
It also exposes <code>/llms.txt</code> for the emerging AI-indexing standard, so models know where to find your content.
<h4>Who is this for?</h4>
1. Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or any CLI that feeds your own site content into an LLM.
If you’ve ever piped a blog post into Claude or ChatGPT for analysis, rewriting, or summarization, you’ve watched it burn through tokens parsing nav menus, footer markup, and CSS classes that have nothing to do with your content. A typical WordPress page measured live: ~19,800 tokens of HTML for ~975 tokens of actual content — a 20x reduction just by stripping the theme. Heavy page-builder sites (Elementor, Divi) routinely hit 100x or more.
That’s the difference between fitting a handful of pages in a context window and fitting dozens.
Just append <code>?format=md</code> to any post URL and pipe it straight into your tool of choice:
<pre><code>curl https://yoursite.com/my-post/?format=md | claude "summarize this"
</code></pre>
2. Site owners getting “high resource usage” warnings from their host because AI bots are hammering the site.
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and a dozen others crawl WordPress sites constantly. Each request renders your full theme, runs widget queries, loads page-builder assets, and ships hundreds of KB of HTML per page — most of which the bot discards before extracting the actual text.
ParseLess intercepts these crawls and serves a tiny Markdown payload instead. You keep the AEO/SEO benefit of being indexed by AI search, without paying the server cost of rendering your full theme for every bot hit.
Typical impact on AI bot traffic (measured on real WordPress pages):
<ul>
<li>95%+ less bandwidth per crawled page (typically 15–30x smaller; e.g. a 79 KB page → 4 KB. Heavy page-builder sites see 100x+)</li>
<li>~60–80% fewer database queries per request</li>
<li>~60% lower peak PHP memory per request</li>
<li>~50–80% faster Time To First Byte (measured 54% on a content-heavy page, 67% on a short one)</li>
<li>On a site with 500 posts crawled monthly by major AI bots, that’s roughly gigabytes → tens of megabytes of monthly bandwidth and a fraction of the cumulative PHP execution time</li>
</ul>
Numbers vary by theme and content. Heavier setups (Elementor, Divi, Avada) see the biggest savings; lightweight themes see less dramatic but still meaningful gains. The conversion is cached as a transient, so repeated bot hits cost almost nothing.
<h4>How it works</h4>
<ul>
<li>AI crawlers are detected by User-Agent and served Markdown automatically — no configuration required.</li>
<li>Humans, search engines, and unknown bots receive your normal HTML output. ParseLess never affects what real visitors see.</li>
<li>The <code>?format=md</code> query parameter works on any post URL for manual preview or CLI piping.</li>
<li><code>/llms.txt</code> is published at your site root with a list of available content for AI indexers.</li>
<li>Conversion happens once per post and is cached. Subsequent requests serve a single transient read.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Automatic Markdown for known AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai, and more)</li>
<li>Manual preview and CLI access via <code>?format=md</code> on any post URL</li>
<li><code>/llms.txt</code> endpoint for AI-indexing standards</li>
<li>Respects noindex flags from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and Genesis</li>
<li>Skips private, draft, password-protected, and trashed posts</li>
<li>Works with all public post types (configurable)</li>
<li>Optional YAML frontmatter (title, URL, author, date, categories, tags, excerpt)</li>
<li>Transient-based caching with configurable TTL</li>
<li>Settings page at Tools → ParseLess for detection mode, bot list, cache TTL, post types, and llms.txt control</li>
<li>Per-post meta box with Markdown preview and copy-to-clipboard</li>
<li>Extensible via filters: <code>md4ai_bot_list</code>, <code>md4ai_supported_post_types</code>, <code>md4ai_markdown_output</code>, <code>md4ai_cache_ttl</code>, <code>md4ai_should_serve_markdown</code></li>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy and data collection</h3>
When logging is enabled (off by default), ParseLess records the following for 
each Markdown request:
<ul>
<li>Post ID, URL, and request timestamp</li>
<li>The full User-Agent header</li>
<li>A salted SHA-256 hash of the requester’s IP address (the raw IP is never stored)</li>
<li>Matched bot identifier, bytes served, and whether the response came from cache</li>
</ul>
IP hashes cannot be reversed from an email address, so the WordPress privacy 
exporter/eraser tools will report no personal data on demand.
Logs are pruned daily according to the configured retention window 
(7/30/90/365 days, default 30). Site owners can disable logging or click 
“Delete all logged requests” at any time from Tools → ParseLess.

ParseLess

Serve your posts as Markdown to AI crawlers and CLI tools — typically 95%+ less bandwidth, ~60–80% fewer DB queries, no theme bloat.

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.

ParseLess vs Coywolf Robots.txt Manager