AumCrawl – AI Crawler Control: See and Block AI Bots

Description

Every publisher is now asking the same question and nobody can answer it: is ChatGPT actually reading my site?

This plugin answers it. It records every known crawler that reaches your site – AI, search engine, SEO tool, link preview – and shows you who came, when, and which pages they read. Then it lets you turn away the ones that give you nothing in return.

AI crawlers are not one thing

Most “block AI” plugins block everything, and that is the wrong move. AI crawlers split into two groups that behave in opposite ways.

Some send traffic back. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Google-Extended fetch a page because a person asked a question, and the answer credits you with a link. Blocking them costs you visits.

Some take and give nothing. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider and the SEO backlink crawlers pull your content into a training corpus or a commercial dataset. No link, no citation, no visitor.

The plugin sorts every crawler into those groups and puts the switch next to the evidence, so you are deciding with numbers in front of you rather than in the abstract.

What it will not let you do

There is deliberately no switch for Googlebot, Bingbot, or the crawlers that build link previews on Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Turning one of those off does real damage, and that belongs in your own robots.txt rather than behind a button you can hit by accident. They are recorded, so you can still see when Google last came by.

Honest about what each control does

• Rules in robots.txt – honoured by every crawler listed in this plugin, and ignored by anything that chooses to. It is a request, not a fence.
• Turning blocked crawlers away – the strongest option. The page is never served. Only works against crawlers that say who they are.
• A “do not train on this” note – the X-Robots-Tag: noai convention. Weak. Some tools read it, many do not. It costs nothing, so it is there, labelled for what it is.

The settings screen shows which of these is genuinely in effect right now. It does not assume a filter worked: it fetches your live robots.txt and looks. If another plugin is replacing the file, or a robots.txt exists on disk, you are told so, told which plugin is responsible, and given the exact lines to paste instead.

Are they really who they say they are?

Anyone can send User-Agent: GPTBot. The plugin checks the claim against the hostname each operator publishes, using forward-confirmed reverse DNS, and shows you which visits could not be verified.

No IP addresses are stored. The address is used inside that one request and then discarded. If a check fails, only a shortened network range is kept – the last part of the address is removed first – which is enough to see that a range is impersonating a crawler without ever recording who connected.

Works alongside your SEO plugin

robots.txt is crowded, so this plugin adds to it rather than taking it over.

• Yoast SEO – rules are appended after Yoast’s, never replacing them
• Rank Math – same, and if Rank Math is set to replace robots.txt entirely you are told, and given the block to paste into its editor
• All in One SEO – same
• SEOPress, Slim SEO, Squirrly, Better Robots.txt – appended
• If any plugin already writes a rule for a crawler, this one stands aside and says so rather than writing a second, conflicting rule

It does not generate llms.txt. That is a different job, and other plugins already do it.

Crawlers covered

Sends traffic back: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended.

Takes and gives nothing back: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent, Amazonbot, Diffbot, omgilibot, AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, MJ12bot, DotBot, DataForSeoBot.

Recorded only: Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Applebot, facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot.

New crawlers appear faster than plugin releases, so the list is filterable. See the FAQ.

No account, no service, no cost

Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no API key to obtain, no external service, and no paid tier. The plugin reads your own traffic and writes its own robots.txt rules.

Source code

The released source is on GitHub at github.com/aumcreate/aumcrawl — bug reports and pull requests are welcome there.

More from AumCreate

The full list of crawlers it knows, how verification works, and what blocking actually changes: aumcreate.com/plugins/aumcrawl

Also free from AumCreate: llms.txt and schema for AI search, AI translation for WordPress, digital-goods checkout for WooCommerce, and a hosted chat widget: aumcreate.com/plugins

Technical details