senols

<p>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.</p>
<p>The dashboard summarizes:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The plugin does not contact any external service. All analytics data is stored in your own WordPress database.</p>
<p>robots.txt publishing is off by default. The plugin can generate and optionally publish policies for:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Important Notes</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>robots.txt is voluntary. Use a WAF, CDN, or server-level controls when technical enforcement is required.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The plugin stores:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The plugin also adds suggested disclosure text to WordPress’ Privacy Policy Guide.</p>


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.

Known Agents

<p>Track crawlers, scrapers, LLM assistants, and AI agents on your website. Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI bots. Formerly Dark Visitors.</p>
<h3>Track, control, and optimize your website for AI agents and bots</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>1. AI Agent & Bot Analytics</h3>
<p>Get realtime visibility into the hidden ecosystem of crawlers, scrapers, and AI agents browsing your website</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Watch traffic from crawlers and scrapers as it happens</strong>: 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><strong>Replay AI agent navigation patterns</strong>: 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><strong>Catch bots spoofing legitimate agents</strong>: Identify bad actors and unauthorized scrapers pretending to be legitimate agents like Googlebot or Bingbot.</li>
<li><strong>Never miss a bot traffic spike</strong>: Stay informed when an agent’s traffic starts surging or overloading your server.</li>
<li><strong>Reveal which agents visit most, and which pages they target</strong>: Break down bot traffic by page to understand what they’re interested in.</li>
<li><strong>Export reports to CSV</strong>: Download agent activity reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>2. LLM Citation & Referral Tracking (GEO, AEO)</h3>
<p>Measure citations and human click-throughs from AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Increase citations in AI chat responses</strong>: See which pages LLMs recommend most often. Double down on content that’s working.</li>
<li><strong>Find out which AI platforms are sending you traffic</strong>: Measure how many humans are clicking through to your website from a citation.</li>
<li><strong>Export reports to CSV</strong>: Download LLM referral reports for custom analysis.</li>
</ul>
<h3>3. Automatic Robots.txt & Bad Bot Detection</h3>
<p>Protect your content and reduce server cost by serving a robots.txt that updates continuously</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Set robots.txt rules for entire categories of bots</strong>: 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><strong>We track new bots, you don’t have to</strong>: Your robots.txt is updated as new agents emerge, so you never have to manage them yourself or make manual edits.</li>
<li><strong>Block misbehaving crawlers and scrapers</strong>: Detect and block bots that ignore your robots.txt rules using the WordPress plugin, or our automation detectors.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Demos</h3>
<p>Demos can be found on the <a href="https://knownagents.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">home page</a>.</p>
<h3>Further Details</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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>.</p>
<p>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>.</p>


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.

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