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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.

Known Agents

Track crawlers, scrapers, LLM assistants, and AI agents on your website. Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI bots. Formerly Dark Visitors.
<h3>Track, control, and optimize your website for AI agents and bots</h3>
You have <a href="https://knownagents.com/insights" rel="nofollow ugc">40% more visitors than you think</a>. Protect your content from unwanted AI scraping, and turn the rising wave of AI agents, LLM assistants, and other bots visiting your website into a new growth channel for your business. For full details, visit the <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Known Agents</a> website.
<h3>1. AI Agent & Bot Analytics</h3>
Get realtime visibility into the hidden ecosystem of crawlers, scrapers, and AI agents browsing your website
<ul>
<li>Watch traffic from crawlers and scrapers as it happens: Track the hidden activity of <a href="https://knownagents.com/agents" rel="nofollow ugc">all known artificial agents</a> visiting your website in real time.</li>
<li>Replay AI agent navigation patterns: Follow a single agent’s session as it navigates your website. Find where agents get stuck, identify dead ends, and help them complete their tasks.</li>
<li>Catch bots spoofing legitimate agents: Identify bad actors and unauthorized scrapers pretending to be legitimate agents like Googlebot or Bingbot.</li>
<li>Never miss a bot traffic spike: Stay informed when an agent’s traffic starts surging or overloading your server.</li>
<li>Reveal which agents visit most, and which pages they target: Break down bot traffic by page to understand what they’re interested in.</li>
<li>Export reports to CSV: Download agent activity reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>2. LLM Citation & Referral Tracking (GEO, AEO)</h3>
Measure citations and human click-throughs from AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
<ul>
<li>Increase citations in AI chat responses: See which pages LLMs recommend most often. Double down on content that’s working.</li>
<li>Find out which AI platforms are sending you traffic: Measure how many humans are clicking through to your website from a citation.</li>
<li>Export reports to CSV: Download LLM referral reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>3. Automatic Robots.txt & Bad Bot Detection</h3>
Protect your content and reduce server cost by serving a robots.txt that updates continuously
<ul>
<li>Set robots.txt rules for entire categories of bots: Control access for entire agent categories including AI crawlers, scrapers, SEO bots, and more. One selection covers every current and future agent in that group.</li>
<li>We track new bots, you don’t have to: Your robots.txt is updated as new agents emerge, so you never have to manage them yourself or make manual edits.</li>
<li>Block misbehaving crawlers and scrapers: Detect and block bots that ignore your robots.txt rules using the WordPress plugin, or our automation detectors.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Demos</h3>
Demos can be found on the <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">home page</a>.
<h3>Further Details</h3>
This plugin connects your website to <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Known Agents</a>. It uses the Known Agents API to connect to your account and provide functionality.
By signing up, you agree to the <a href="https://knownagents.com/terms-of-service" rel="nofollow ugc">Terms of Service</a> and <a href="https://knownagents.com/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a>.
Are you finding this plugin useful? Please <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/dark-visitors/reviews/#new-post" rel="ugc">leave us a ★★★★★ review</a>! Questions or issues? <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/dark-visitors/" rel="ugc">Ask us for help</a>.

Known Agents – Track AI Bots and Crawlers, Block Scrapers, Analyze LLM Referral Traffic


Please remind me in a month to provide an update on the performance of this plugin on a heavily visited website.


Begun my review...


An easy improvement would be to link to the settings page from the plugin entry like other plugins, other than that, in general this plugin and its online dashboard is generally well thought out and useful. My website is small and has limited resources that get overrun by crawlers making it unavailable. This plugin helps identify the culprits and decide if I should block them or not. For free you can block them in robots.txt, as I have a physical file, the plugin won't touch that but its easy to add manually. It will report those crawlers that ignore the robots file and the paid version will enforce those rules, but I just update ".htaccess" myself.



I'm reducing my rating by a star since you won't get much "Agent Analytics" (per month) and for my tiny site it quickly ran out, we are a NFP so don't have money to burn on subscriptions.  The the description for the plan incorrectly states "Unlimited Agent Analytics" when the plan only includes 100,000 events.


Very Useful Plugin


Very good: shows all bot-crawlers.Our website was sometimes down due to bot-crawlers, with this tool it is easy to solve. Very good logging of bots.This was the only good plugin I could find for this purpose.Some bots ignore robots.txt. So I manually changed htaccess, that worked very good.


Very very helpful

Track crawlers, scrapers, LLM assistants, and AI agents on your website. Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI bots. Formerly Dark Visitors.

ParseLess vs Known Agents – Track AI Bots and Crawlers, Block Scrapers, Analyze LLM Referral Traffic