Description
Any script can claim to be GPTBot. This plugin checks whether it really is.
Most AI bot trackers read the user-agent string and take it at face value — so a scraper that sends User-agent: GPTBot gets logged as OpenAI. Forge AI Bot Log verifies each visit against the crawler’s own published infrastructure — the IP-range lists OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish, and forward-confirmed reverse DNS for Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta — and labels every hit Verified, Spoofed or Unverified. You find out which AI traffic genuinely came from OpenAI, and which was something else wearing its name.
Verification covers every crawler that publishes a way to check it, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Amazon, Apple and Meta. Bots with no published verification method are labelled Unverified rather than guessed at.
Beyond verification, Forge AI Bot Log shows you exactly which AI crawlers and assistants are visiting your WordPress site and explains what each one actually does. The bundled directory covers 26 bots from 16 companies, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, PerplexityBot, GrokBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot, Applebot, Applebot-Extended, meta-externalagent, cohere-ai, Diffbot, YouBot, MistralAI-User and DuckAssistBot.
Key features
- Live dashboard — bot visits for the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, plus a complete searchable log.
- Bot directory — click any bot for a plain-English explanation of who owns it, whether it trains AI models on your pages, powers AI search, or fetches pages live, and whether it obeys robots.txt.
- Most-crawled content — see which of your pages AI bots are reading most.
- Verified / Spoofed labelling — every tracked hit is checked against the vendor’s published IP ranges or by forward-confirmed reverse DNS, whichever that crawler’s owner publishes, so impersonation is flagged instead of trusted. Results are cached and throttled to keep it off the critical path.
- Access control — block any bot with one click. Blocking adds a
Disallow: /directive for that crawler to your robots.txt, and there is a hard-block.htaccesssnippet for the bots that ignore robots.txt. - Monthly email summary — sent to the site admin on the 1st of each month at 9am, covering the previous month.
- New-bot alerts — optional email the first time a brand-new AI bot appears.
- Reliable capture — an in-PHP logger, an optional must-use early logger, and a server access-log importer for sites behind full-page caching or a CDN.
- Privacy-friendly — only logs bots, not human visitors, with optional IP anonymisation and configurable data retention.
- CSV export — download the full or filtered activity log for your own analysis.
Why it matters
AI crawlers may use your content as training data, cite you in AI search answers, or read your pages on a user’s behalf. Which of those you want is your call — but you cannot make that call without seeing the traffic first. Forge AI Bot Log makes AI bot activity visible and gives you the controls to manage it.
Who this is for
Publishers and bloggers deciding whether to opt out of LLM training. Site owners who suspect content scraping and want evidence. Agencies monitoring client sites, who need to monitor crawler activity across a portfolio. Anyone who has read that they should block AI bots but wants to know which bots are actually visiting before blocking anything. If you want an AI bot blocker that shows you its work rather than a blocklist you have to trust, this is it.
Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are opt-out tokens rather than crawlers in their own right, and the plugin treats them as such — so you can decline LLM training without touching normal search crawling.
Powered and maintained by Forge
Forge AI Bot Log is powered and maintained by forge.co.nz, a New Zealand web design and development studio. We build and support the plugin, keep the bundled crawler list current with each release, and read every support thread.
External services
Crawler IP-range lists. To confirm that a visit claiming to be an OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity crawler really came from that company, the plugin downloads the IP-range list each vendor publishes for exactly this purpose, and compares the visiting IP against it. The lists are fetched at most once every 24 hours and cached in your database; only the request for the public list is made, and no site, user or visitor data is transmitted. This happens only while bot verification is enabled in Settings.
The lists fetched are:
- OpenAI — https://openai.com/gptbot.json, https://openai.com/searchbot.json and https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. Terms: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/ — Privacy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
- Anthropic — https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json. Terms: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms — Privacy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
- Perplexity — https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json and https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json. Terms: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/legal/terms-of-service — Privacy: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/legal/privacy-policy
Installation
- Upload the
forge-ai-bot-logfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install via Plugins Add New. - Activate the plugin.
- Visit Forge AI Bot Log in the admin menu.
- (Optional, for cached sites) Copy
mu-plugin/forge-ai-bot-log-mu.phpinto/wp-content/mu-plugins/for earlier capture, or use Settings Import from server access log. Note that the early logger runs before verification is possible, so hits it captures are recorded as “No check” rather than Verified or Spoofed.
FAQ
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How do I stop ChatGPT from using my content?
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Block GPTBot to stop OpenAI collecting your pages as training data for its models, and block OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User if you also want to keep your content out of ChatGPT’s search and live page-fetching. The plugin lists all three separately, because most people want to opt out of training without disappearing from AI search. Blocking writes the relevant robots.txt directives for you.
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Can I tell if a bot claiming to be GPTBot is fake?
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Yes — that is the main reason this plugin exists. A user-agent string is trivial to forge, so any scraper can send
GPTBotand appear in your logs as OpenAI. On each tracked visit the plugin checks the visiting IP against whichever proof that crawler’s owner publishes. For OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity that is their official IP-range list. For Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta it is a reverse DNS lookup on the visiting IP, re-resolving the hostname it gets back to confirm it maps to the same address and to the crawler’s published domain. Genuine crawlers pass; spoofing does not. Hits are labelled Verified, Spoofed or Unverified so you can see the difference. -
How do I block AI bots in robots txt?
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Tick the bots you want to block on the plugin’s Access page. The directives are merged into the robots.txt WordPress serves, so you never edit a file by hand. One caveat worth knowing: if a real
robots.txtfile exists in your site root, your web server serves that file directly and WordPress never runs — so the plugin’s rules will not appear. Delete or fold in that physical file if you want the plugin to manage your AI crawler directives. -
Does blocking a bot really stop it?
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robots.txt is advisory. Well-behaved bots obey it; some (Bytespider, Perplexity-User and Grok’s fetchers, in the bundled list) are reported to ignore it. For those the plugin generates an
.htaccesshard-block snippet that rejects them at the server level, on Apache. -
Does blocking Google-Extended remove me from Google Search?
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No. Google-Extended controls whether your content is used to train and ground Google’s Gemini models. Normal Google Search crawling and indexing is done by Googlebot, which this plugin does not touch, so your search rankings are unaffected. Note also that blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from AI Overviews, which are generated from Google’s regular search index.
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Which AI crawlers can it detect?
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26 bots from 16 companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, xAI, Amazon, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, Cohere, Mistral AI, DuckDuckGo, You.com, Diffbot, Timpi and Common Crawl — split into AI training crawlers, AI search indexers and live retrieval agents. Each has its own entry explaining what it does with your pages. The crawlers behind the big assistants are all covered, so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity traffic is identified by name rather than lumped together.
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Grok read my site but nothing was logged — why?
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xAI is the least transparent of the major AI companies. Its documented user agents (GrokBot, xAI-Grok, Grok-DeepSearch) are in the bundled directory and are logged when they appear, but independent monitoring consistently finds that much of Grok’s real fetching arrives under generic Chrome or Safari user-agent strings from rotating IP addresses, which no user-agent-based tracker can attribute. Grok can also answer questions from its search partner’s existing index without visiting your site at all. So treat Grok’s numbers in any tool — this one included — as a minimum.
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Does this slow down my site?
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No. Logging is limited to matched AI bots and runs on an early hook, and verification is throttled and cached — vendor IP-range lists are fetched at most once a day and stored locally. LLMs are not consulted at any point; detection is local pattern matching against the bundled list.
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Will it catch bots if I use a caching plugin or CDN?
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Full-page caches can serve bots without running PHP. Use the included must-use early logger and/or the access-log importer to capture those hits.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Forge AI Bot Log – Block AI Bots, Crawler Detection & Verification” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.3.0
- Added: xAI’s Grok crawlers — GrokBot, xAI-Grok and Grok-DeepSearch — to the bot directory, with an honest note that much of Grok’s fetching uses disguised browser user agents no tracker can attribute.
- Security: forwarding headers (X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, CF-Connecting-IP) are no longer trusted from arbitrary clients — previously a request could forge a vendor IP in a header and have a fake crawler labelled Verified. Cloudflare’s header is now honoured only when the request genuinely arrives from Cloudflare’s published ranges, and generic proxy headers only behind a local reverse proxy.
- Fixed: blocking a bot on the Access page now actually reaches robots.txt. The directives were only ever assembled inside the admin, so the block shown in the preview never appeared in the robots.txt served to crawlers.
- Fixed: hits captured by the optional early logger (mu-plugin) now record the visitor’s IP address and are labelled “No check” instead of being mislabelled “Unverified”.
- Fixed: the early logger now honours the excluded-paths and IP-anonymisation settings, matching the main logger.
- Performance: the early logger no longer reads the signature list for ordinary human traffic.
- Fixed: uninstalling now clears any pending new-bot alert events instead of leaving them scheduled.
- Removed: the cross-promotion email settings and the optional remote promo feed. Existing promo settings are cleaned up automatically. The
forge_ai_bot_log_default_promosandforge_ai_bot_log_email_promosfilters are removed with them.
1.2.4
- Fixed: OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity crawlers are now verified against the vendors’ published IP-range lists instead of reverse DNS, which those vendors don’t support — genuine ClaudeBot/GPTBot hits were previously shown as Spoofed/Unverified.
1.2.3
- Documentation: expanded and clarified the readme, with new FAQs on blocking, verification and robots.txt handling.
- Documentation: corrected the verification description — hits are labelled Verified, Spoofed or Unverified, not only the first two.
- Documentation: clarified that robots.txt directives are merged into the robots.txt WordPress serves, and that a physical robots.txt file in the site root overrides them.
- Internal version constant bumped to match the plugin header, so browsers re-fetch the plugin’s CSS and JavaScript once. No other functional changes.
1.2.2
- Fixed: genuine bots visiting over IPv6 are no longer incorrectly marked “Spoofed” by DNS verification.
1.2.1
- Removed the remote bot-list auto-updater; the bundled bot list now updates via plugin releases.
1.2.0
- Added an External services disclosure for the optional promo feed.
- Added a Settings shortcut to the Plugins screen.
- New-bot alert emails are now sent on a background schedule instead of during the visit.
Older entries (1.0.0 – 1.1.1) are in changelog.txt in the plugin folder.