Title: TrafficPaywall
Author: mbskydis
Published: October 5, 2026
Last modified: October 5, 2026
---
Search plugins
# TrafficPaywall
By [mbskydis](https://profiles.wordpress.org/mbskydis/)
[Download](https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/trafficpaywall.1.0.1.zip)
* [Details](https://wordpress.org/plugins/trafficpaywall/#description)
* [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/plugins/trafficpaywall/#reviews)
* [Installation](https://wordpress.org/plugins/trafficpaywall/#installation)
* [Development](https://wordpress.org/plugins/trafficpaywall/#developers)
[Support](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/trafficpaywall/)
## Description
**Get paid when AI crawlers access your WordPress site.**
AI companies send crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and Bytespider to read
your articles and train their models. They take your content for free. TrafficPaywall
makes them pay for it.
* **AI crawlers pay per request.** You set the price per 1,000 requests in your
TrafficPaywall dashboard (for example $5). Crawlers that pay get your pages.
Crawlers that don’t pay get a “402 Payment Required” response instead of your
content.
* **You keep 75%.** Every payment goes to your balance and is paid out to your
bank through Stripe. The plugin is free; there is no subscription.
* **People and search engines are never charged.** Visitors read exactly as before.
Google, Bing and other search engines, ad crawlers (AdSense, Google Ads) and
AI answer engines that send you visitors (ChatGPT search, Perplexity) pass for
free, so your SEO and ads keep working.
* **One click to connect.** Click “Connect and start earning”, sign in, confirm
your site. No DNS change, no Cloudflare account, no hosting change.
* **See what AI takes.** The TrafficPaywall screen in WordPress shows your AI revenue,
paid requests, AI requests detected, unpaid requests stopped and the estimated
amount of content that was not handed over, plus your top crawlers.
#### How it works
1. Each request is classified on your own server, using crawler rules the plugin downloads
every hour. Nothing is sent to TrafficPaywall for normal page views.
2. Known AI training crawlers and scripted scrapers without payment get HTTP 402 with
instructions on how to pay. Crawlers that pretend to be Googlebot from the wrong
network are caught as well.
3. A crawler that pays sends its TrafficPaywall key with the request. The plugin confirms
the payment with TrafficPaywall and serves the page.
4. If a real person is ever caught by mistake, they click “I’m human — continue”,
pass a quick check and keep reading for 24 hours.
AI companies hold one prepaid balance that works on every TrafficPaywall site, so
paying you takes them one line of code.
#### Built to never break your site
* If TrafficPaywall is unreachable, your site keeps working: decisions are made
locally, and paid requests are let through when a payment cannot be confirmed.
* Logged-in users, wp-admin, logins, cron, AJAX, form posts, webhooks, robots.txt,
sitemaps, ads.txt, llms.txt and /.well-known/ are never touched.
* 402 responses are never stored in page caches. A built-in site check tells you
if a page cache answers before WordPress, and can fix WP Super Cache, W3 Total
Cache and WP Rocket for you.
#### What is protected
All public pages, posts, archives and feeds for anonymous visitors, and the REST
API (for example `/wp-json/wp/v2/posts`) for anonymous clients, because scrapers
use it to pull full articles.
The plugin also publishes your license terms where AI companies look for them: a`
License:` line in robots.txt, a `` tag in your pages and a `
Link` header on responses to crawlers.
### External services
This plugin connects to the TrafficPaywall service (trafficpaywall.com), operated
by TrafficPaywall, to process crawler payments. **Nothing is sent before you click“
Connect and start earning”** (or enter a site key under Advanced). Disconnecting
stops all requests.
Terms of service: https://trafficpaywall.com/terms
Privacy policy: https://trafficpaywall.
com/privacy
What is sent, when, and to which address (all under https://trafficpaywall.com):
* **Connect** – `https://trafficpaywall.com/connect/wordpress` opens in your browser
with your site address, a random one-time state value and the address of the
WordPress admin screen to return to. After you confirm, your server sends the
one-time code it received and your site address to `POST /api/v1/connect/wordpress/
exchange` and receives the site key and signing secret.
* **Site settings** – every 5 minutes, `GET /api/v1/config/{site key}` downloads
your mode, price and license links. Only the site key is sent.
* **Crawler rules** – every hour and when you connect, `GET /api/v1/rules` downloads
the public list of crawler user agents and network ranges. Nothing about your
site or visitors is sent.
* **Reporting** – every 10 minutes, `POST /api/v1/ingest` sends aggregate counts
per day of AI and bot requests (outcome, crawler category and crawler name, number
of requests and estimated bytes not delivered), signed with your site key. No
IP addresses, user agents, URLs, cookies or other visitor data are sent. Human
visits are only included as one sampled daily total.
* **Paid requests** – only when a request carries TrafficPaywall payment credentials(
an API key, license token or TrafficPaywall session cookie), `POST /api/v1/spend`
sends the credential and the full URL of the page requested, signed with your
site key, to charge the crawler. This call is made from your server while the
request is handled.
* **Dashboard** – when you open the TrafficPaywall screen in wp-admin, `GET /api/
v1/site/summary` loads this month’s revenue, paid requests and payout status (
cached for 5 minutes). Only the site key and a signature are sent.
Visitors who click “I’m human — continue” on the 402 page go to `https://trafficpaywall.
com/access` in their browser, pass a check, and are sent back to your site with
a signed pass that is stored in a `tp_access` cookie for up to 24 hours and verified
on your server.
For the site check and for estimating page size, your server also requests your
own home page and up to three recent posts (loopback requests to your own site;
nothing is sent to TrafficPaywall).
## Installation
1. Install and activate the plugin from Plugins Add New (search “TrafficPaywall”),
or upload the zip.
2. Open **TrafficPaywall** in the admin menu and click **Connect and start earning**.
3. Sign in to TrafficPaywall (a magic link is emailed to you) and confirm your site.
You are sent back to WordPress, connected, and the site check runs.
4. In your TrafficPaywall dashboard, set up payouts to your bank and adjust your price
if you like.
If your site is behind Cloudflare, the plugin detects it and uses the real visitor
IP. For another reverse proxy or load balancer, set Advanced “Behind Cloudflare/
reverse proxy” to **Yes**.
## FAQ
### Will this hurt my Google rankings or my ads?
No. Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, DuckDuckBot and others)
and ad crawlers (AdSense, Google Ads landing-page checks) always pass for free.
Googlebot is verified by Google’s published network ranges, so fake “Googlebots”
are charged instead. robots.txt and sitemaps are never blocked.
### Will my visitors see anything?
No. People read exactly as before. Traffic from cloud and datacenter networks with
a normal browser is only counted as a “possible bot”, not stopped, unless you choose
to charge it in your dashboard.
### How much will I earn?
It depends on how much AI crawler traffic your site gets and your price. The TrafficPaywall
screen shows how many AI requests your site gets and how many were stopped because
the crawler did not pay. You can also switch to Monitor mode in your dashboard to
count without stopping anything.
### How and when am I paid?
Your share (75% of what crawlers pay) accumulates in your TrafficPaywall balance
and is paid out to your bank through Stripe. Set up payouts in your dashboard.
### How do crawlers pay?
A crawler sends `Authorization: Bearer ` with its request. The
plugin confirms the charge with TrafficPaywall and serves the page with an `x-tp-
charged` header. A crawler is charged at most once per page per day. Crawlers without
credits get a 402 response that explains how to buy them.
### Does it slow my site down?
No. Requests are classified on your server in well under a millisecond, with no
call to TrafficPaywall. Counters are written after the page is sent. Only paid crawler
requests wait for TrafficPaywall to confirm the payment.
### What if TrafficPaywall is down?
Your site keeps working. Unpaid AI crawlers are still stopped from the rules stored
on your site, and paid requests are let through when payment cannot be confirmed.
### Does it work with page caches?
Yes, with one step. A page cache that serves stored pages before WordPress loads
also serves them to crawlers. The site check detects this and shows how to exclude
AI crawlers from the cache; for WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache it enables PHP
page caching with Late Init so TrafficPaywall runs first. Cached reader pages are
still served after WordPress starts. For WP Rocket it adds named-client exclusions;
requests with a missing or changed User-Agent can bypass those exclusions. For complete
enforcement, bypass page caching on protected pages or use Edge Protection. For
host and CDN caches it links to Edge Protection, which stops unpaid crawlers before
they reach your server.
### Can I keep something free for bots?
Yes, with the `trafficpaywall_skip_request` filter, for example to keep RSS feeds
free:
```
add_filter( 'trafficpaywall_skip_request', function ( $skip, $req ) { return $skip || false !== strpos( $req->path, '/feed' ); }, 10, 2 );
```
### Where is robots.txt handled?
The `License:` line is added to the robots.txt that WordPress generates. If you
have a physical robots.txt file, add the line yourself; the address is in your TrafficPaywall
dashboard.
### What does uninstalling remove?
Deleting the plugin removes its database table, settings and scheduled jobs. Your
TrafficPaywall account and earnings are not affected.
## Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
## Contributors & Developers
“TrafficPaywall” is open source software. The following people have contributed
to this plugin.
Contributors
* [ mbskydis ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/mbskydis/)
[Translate “TrafficPaywall” into your language.](https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/trafficpaywall)
### Interested in development?
[Browse the code](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trafficpaywall/), check
out the [SVN repository](https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/trafficpaywall/), or
subscribe to the [development log](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/trafficpaywall/)
by [RSS](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/trafficpaywall/?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss).
## Changelog
#### 1.0.1
* Fix enforcement on warmed WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache pages; test ordinary
reader pages before the crawler probes.
* Prevent paid response receipts from entering shared caches and refresh policy
without stale cached configuration.
* Resume background jobs across a multisite network after reactivation.
#### 1.0.0
* First release: one-click connect, local crawler classification with verified
crawler networks, per-request payments, in-WordPress dashboard, site check with
page-cache fixes, license discovery (robots.txt, link tag, Link header).
## Meta
* Version **1.0.1**
* Last updated **17 hours ago**
* Active installations **Fewer than 10**
* WordPress version ** 6.2 or higher **
* Tested up to **7.1.2**
* PHP version ** 7.4 or higher **
* Tags
* [AI](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/ai/)[AI Crawlers](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/ai-crawlers/)
[bots](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/bots/)[gptbot](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/gptbot/)
[monetization](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/monetization/)
* [Advanced View](https://wordpress.org/plugins/trafficpaywall/advanced/)
## Ratings
No reviews have been submitted yet.
[Your review](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/trafficpaywall/reviews/#new-post)
[See all reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/trafficpaywall/reviews/)
## Contributors
* [ mbskydis ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/mbskydis/)
## Support
Got something to say? Need help?
[View support forum](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/trafficpaywall/)