ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl

Description

Most of a website’s traffic is not human. Search indexers, AI crawlers, LLM “readers”, scrapers and autonomous agents fetch pages all day and pay nothing. This plugin gives that traffic a price.

• Humans see nothing different. Browsers get the page as always.
• Verified search engines stay free. Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Applebot and friends are checked by reverse DNS so your SEO is untouched. A crawler that only claims to be Googlebot is treated as a script.
• AI crawlers, SEO crawlers and scripts get HTTP 402 Payment Required. The response carries the x402 challenge (v2 header and v1 body, so every current client can pay) and an MPP challenge. The client pays USDC on Base and retries; the page is served only after the payment is settled on-chain.
• You keep 100%. The payer’s USDC goes directly to the wallet you enter. Nothing is held by the plugin, by ForgeMesh, or by anyone else.
• Bot analytics in wp-admin. Who is crawling (by name and class), how often, from how many sources, which paths, what was paid, every settlement with its transaction link. Start in Monitor mode and see what the bots would have paid before you charge anything.
• Pro (optional, $4.99/month). A hosted dashboard for up to 5 sites, a Monday digest, daily paywall monitoring with alerts, a crawler-intelligence feed that keeps the bot list current, and a listing in the paid-sites directory. Everything above works without it.
• Discovery built in. The plugin serves /.well-known/x402.json, /llms.txt and /agents.txt and adds lines to robots.txt, so paying agents and x402 indexes find your paid pages.

How a payment works

1. A bot requests a page and gets 402 Payment Required with the price, asset (USDC on Base) and your wallet.
2. The bot signs a USDC transfer authorization and retries with it in a header.
3. The plugin sends that authorization to an x402 facilitator, which checks it and submits it on-chain. The facilitator never holds funds.
4. The plugin serves the page only when the facilitator returns a transaction hash, and records the hit, the payer and the hash.

Third-party services

The plugin makes outbound requests only when a payment is presented, and only to the x402 facilitator configured in Settings:

• PayAI facilitator (default): https://facilitator.payai.network — terms · privacy. It receives the payer’s signed authorization and the payment terms (your wallet address, amount, the page URL). No visitor data, no site content.

• Or any facilitator URL you enter, including one you run yourself.

• ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl Pro (only after you enter a Pro license key): https://proxy.forgemesh.io — terms · privacy. The plugin sends your license key, the site’s host, name, mode, price and payout wallet, daily per-bot counts (bot name, class, hits, paid, revenue, number of distinct hashed sources) and settlement records (transaction hash, payer wallet, path, amount). No visitor IPs, no page content, no human user agents. It pulls a crawler list from the same service once a day. Without a key the plugin never contacts ForgeMesh.

Search-engine verification uses ordinary DNS lookups.

Privacy

Visitor IP addresses are never stored. Bot sources are counted by a daily-salted hash. Human page views are stored only as a count (class “human”, no user agent) when that option is on. Rows are deleted after the retention period you set.