Forge AI Bot Log – AI Crawler Detection, Verification & Blocking

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 using forward-confirmed reverse DNS — the technique Google, OpenAI and Anthropic recommend for confirming their own crawlers — and labels every hit Verified or Spoofed. 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 honestly rather than guessed at.

Beyond verification, Forge AI Bot Log shows you exactly which AI crawlers and assistants are visiting your WordPress site — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, Bytespider and many more — and explains what each one actually does.

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 / powers AI search / 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 — forward-confirmed reverse DNS on every tracked hit, so impersonators are flagged instead of trusted. Results are cached and throttled to keep it off the critical path.
• Access control — block or allow each bot with one click (writes robots.txt rules), plus a hard-block .htaccess snippet for 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 to train models, cite you in AI search answers, or read your pages on a user’s behalf. Forge AI Bot Log makes that traffic visible and gives you the controls to manage it.

External services

Cross-promotion feed (optional). If you enter a promo feed URL in Settings, the plugin fetches that URL to populate the “more plugins” block in its own emails. Only the request is made; no site, user, or visitor data is transmitted. No feed URL is configured by default.