First release, so nothing to upgrade from yet. If you are installing it fresh: please read the "here is what\nit cannot do" section before you trust it with anything. That part is the honest bit.<\/p>"},"ratings":[],"assets_icons":{"icon-128x128.png":{"filename":"icon-128x128.png","revision":3670208,"resolution":"128x128","location":"assets","locale":"","width":128,"height":128},"icon-256x256.png":{"filename":"icon-256x256.png","revision":3670208,"resolution":"256x256","location":"assets","locale":"","width":256,"height":256}},"assets_banners":{"banner-1544x500.png":{"filename":"banner-1544x500.png","revision":3670208,"resolution":"1544x500","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1544,"height":500},"banner-772x250.png":{"filename":"banner-772x250.png","revision":3670208,"resolution":"772x250","location":"assets","locale":"","width":772,"height":250}},"assets_blueprints":{},"all_blocks":[],"tagged_versions":["1.0.0"],"block_files":[],"assets_screenshots":{"screenshot-1.jpg":{"filename":"screenshot-1.jpg","revision":3670208,"resolution":"1","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1400,"height":823},"screenshot-2.jpg":{"filename":"screenshot-2.jpg","revision":3670208,"resolution":"2","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1400,"height":823},"screenshot-3.jpg":{"filename":"screenshot-3.jpg","revision":3670208,"resolution":"3","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1400,"height":823},"screenshot-4.jpg":{"filename":"screenshot-4.jpg","revision":3670208,"resolution":"4","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1400,"height":823},"screenshot-5.jpg":{"filename":"screenshot-5.jpg","revision":3670208,"resolution":"5","location":"assets","locale":"","width":1400,"height":823}},"screenshots":{"1":"Protection status \u2014 what is actually working on your server, tested rather than assumed.","2":"Setup \u2014 one question configures everything.","3":"Crawler Control \u2014 every AI crawler, what it does, and your decision.","4":"Declarations \u2014 your reservation of rights, and the signals published in your robots.txt.","5":"AI inside WordPress \u2014 switch off the AI built into core, and the AI your other plugins added."}},"plugin_section":[],"plugin_tags":[2353,246479,18193,2972,12753],"plugin_category":[],"plugin_contributors":[203184,203183],"plugin_business_model":[],"class_list":["post-357465","plugin","type-plugin","status-publish","hentry","plugin_tags-ai","plugin_tags-ai-crawlers","plugin_tags-content-protection","plugin_tags-copyright","plugin_tags-robots-txt","plugin_contributors-adictonat0r","plugin_contributors-lazycodelab","plugin_committers-lazycodelab"],"banners":{"banner":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/banner-772x250.png?rev=3670208","banner_2x":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/banner-1544x500.png?rev=3670208","banner_rtl":false,"banner_2x_rtl":false},"icons":{"svg":false,"icon":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/icon-128x128.png?rev=3670208","icon_2x":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/icon-256x256.png?rev=3670208","generated":false},"screenshots":[{"src":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/screenshot-1.jpg?rev=3670208","caption":"Protection status \u2014 what is actually working on your server, tested rather than assumed."},{"src":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/screenshot-2.jpg?rev=3670208","caption":"Setup \u2014 one question configures everything."},{"src":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/screenshot-3.jpg?rev=3670208","caption":"Crawler Control \u2014 every AI crawler, what it does, and your decision."},{"src":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/screenshot-4.jpg?rev=3670208","caption":"Declarations \u2014 your reservation of rights, and the signals published in your robots.txt."},{"src":"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/ai-blackout\/assets\/screenshot-5.jpg?rev=3670208","caption":"AI inside WordPress \u2014 switch off the AI built into core, and the AI your other plugins added."}],"raw_content":"\n
You wrote the thing. You researched it, rewrote the opening four times, published it at some ridiculous hour.\nThen a crawler you have never heard of fed it into a training set, and now a chatbot answers people's\nquestions using your words, and nobody ever lands on your site.<\/p>\n\n
I get it. That is exactly why this plugin exists.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n AI Blackout says no on both fronts: it keeps AI out of your content<\/em>, and it keeps AI out of your\nWordPress<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n Block the crawlers that collect content for AI training, and publish a formal reservation of your rights, so\nthat using your work is not something anyone can claim they did by accident.<\/p>\n\n WordPress 7.0 shipped with AI built into core, and your plugins keep adding more of it. Switch it off, close\nthe interface that lets AI agents act on your site, and find out which of your plugins have quietly been\nsending your content to AI companies.<\/p>\n\n No wizard with nine steps. You answer one question and everything is configured. Every single part of it\nstays visible and changeable afterwards.<\/p>\n\n Getting your site dropped from Google is the worst thing a plugin like this could possibly do to you. So it\nis prevented structurally<\/em>, not by being careful.<\/p>\n\n Googlebot and its seven siblings, Bingbot, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, Applebot and the Facebook,\nX\/Twitter and LinkedIn preview bots sit on a protected list, 18 identifiers in total. Every rule the plugin\ngenerates is tested against that list before a single byte is written, and a rule that would collide with one\nis dropped. The plugin will not even load a crawler list that is missing its protected section.<\/p>\n\n A handful of AI crawlers do<\/em> decide whether you show up in AI assistants' answers. Those are labelled as\nsuch, and blocking one takes a separate, explicit confirmation.<\/p>\n\n Blocks crawlers, three ways.<\/strong> A request in robots.txt. A refusal from WordPress itself. And on Apache or\nLiteSpeed, a refusal from your web server, before WordPress or your caching plugin is ever involved. The\nplugin tells you which of these are genuinely working on your<\/em> server, instead of assuming all three are.<\/p>\n\n Publishes your rights.<\/strong> A reservation under Article 4(3) of the EU copyright directive, served at the\nstandard address AI companies check. Content Signals in robots.txt, which separate \"you may index this\" from\n\"you may train on this\". Meta tags for the crawlers that read those instead. And a matching clause for your\nterms page, written for you.<\/p>\n\n It also keeps a dated record<\/strong> of every wording you have ever published. That record is the part that\nactually matters if you ever need to point at it.<\/p>\n\n Switches off AI inside WordPress.<\/strong> Turns off WordPress core's own AI, closes the Abilities interface,\nhides the screen where AI provider keys get entered, and strips the AI features out of Elementor and\nYoast SEO using the off-switches those plugins provide themselves.<\/p>\n\n Watches what your site sends out.<\/strong> Every request your site makes to an AI company gets logged: which\nplugin made it, where it was going, how many times. It watches<\/em> by default and blocks only when you say so,\nbecause a plugin you pay for should not silently start failing the moment you activate this one.<\/p>\n\n The crawler list ships inside<\/strong> the plugin and updates when the plugin updates.<\/p>\n\n This plugin makes no external requests of any kind.<\/strong> Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is fetched. No\naccount, no licence key, no analytics, no remote ruleset, no \"anonymous usage data\". The only request it ever\nmakes is to your own site<\/em>, when you press Test my protection<\/strong>, so it can report what a crawler actually\nreceives rather than what your settings claim.<\/p>\n\n This section matters more to me than the feature list, so please read it.<\/p>\n\n Nothing is ever written to a file unless you ask for it. You are shown the exact<\/strong> change first: the block\nitself, and the whole file as it will look afterwards. Then you confirm it.<\/p>\n\n Removing it puts the file back byte for byte<\/strong>, and the plugin tells you plainly whether it managed that or\nwhether something else edited the file in the meantime. If your site had no Deactivating the plugin removes the rules it wrote.<\/strong> A blocking rule sitting in AI Blackout is free for individuals and stays that way. If it saved you some grief and you feel like buying\nme a coffee, the donate link is up there. \u2615 Entirely optional, and nothing in the plugin will ever nag you\nabout it.<\/p>\n\n AI Blackout is an independent plugin by LazyCodeLab. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or\nconnected to any of the companies, products or services it names. Names such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google,\nElementor and Yoast SEO appear only to identify whose crawler is being blocked or whose AI feature is being\nswitched off, and remain the property of their respective owners.<\/p>\n\n\n Open AI Blackout \u2192 Status<\/strong> whenever you want to see exactly what is working, tested against your live site\nrather than assumed.<\/p>\n\n\n No. Search engines sit on a protected list of 18 identifiers, and every rule is tested against that list\nbefore it is written. A rule that would catch one of them is dropped rather than written. If you choose to\nblock an AI crawler that affects whether you appear in AI assistants' answers, the plugin says so plainly and\nasks you to confirm that one separately.<\/p><\/dd>\n No. There is nothing loaded on the front end: no scripts, no stylesheets, no per-page database queries.\nBlocked crawlers are turned away by a user-agent check and nothing else.<\/p><\/dd>\n Yes. robots.txt and the WordPress-level refusal both work on nginx with zero setup. The only thing you cannot\nhave without your host's help is the server-level rule. The plugin writes that rule out for you, plus the\nmessage to send them.<\/p><\/dd>\n The robots.txt and server-level layers do, because they run before your cache. The WordPress-level refusal\ndoes not, because a page served from cache never reaches WordPress at all. The Status screen detects your\ncache and tells you exactly which layers that affects, rather than leaving you to work it out.<\/p><\/dd>\n No. Their AI features are switched off using the off-switches those plugins ship themselves, and nothing is\nwritten into their settings. Turn it off here and everything is precisely as it was.<\/p><\/dd>\n Yes, and that is the default. Crawlers that collect training data get refused; the ones that fetch a page\nbecause a real person asked a question are allowed through. Every crawler is listed separately with what it\nactually does, so you can go through them one at a time if you want to.<\/p><\/dd>\n No. Existing keys are left completely alone. They simply cannot be used while AI is switched off. Keys set\nin They go back to how they were. Deactivating removes the rules from Deleting the plugin removes the lot by default: any rules still in your files, the settings, the activity log\ntable, the scheduled cleanup job. No leftovers, no orphaned database rows, no mystery lines in your\n .htaccess six months later.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n If you would rather not start from scratch should you ever reinstall, there is a checkbox at the bottom of\nthe Declarations<\/strong> screen that keeps your settings and your dated declaration record through a delete.\nWorth ticking if you have been publishing a reservation of rights for a while. That record is dated evidence\nand it cannot be recreated after the fact. It keeps information<\/em>, though, not protection: once the plugin is\ndeleted nothing is blocking anyone either way.<\/p><\/dd>\n Because that is literally what it does. The site goes dark to AI: it cannot get in<\/em> through your crawlers,\nand it cannot run inside<\/em> your WordPress. Both halves are the same idea.<\/p><\/dd>\n\n<\/dl>\n\n\nKeep AI out of your content<\/h4>\n\n
Keep AI out of your WordPress<\/h4>\n\n
One question. That is the whole setup.<\/h4>\n\n
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Your search traffic is never touched. Ever.<\/h4>\n\n
What it actually does<\/h4>\n\n
26 crawlers, 9 companies, no phoning home<\/h4>\n\n
Honestly, here is what it cannot do<\/h4>\n\n
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Your files are yours<\/h4>\n\n
.htaccess<\/code> before and the plugin\ncreated one, removing the rules deletes that file too, rather than leaving an empty one behind.<\/p>\n\n.htaccess<\/code> with no plugin\nmanaging it is not protection, it is a booby trap. It would also make \"let me deactivate this and see if it\nwas the cause\" give you the wrong answer. So deactivation puts your files back. Your settings, your crawler\nchoices and your dated declaration record all stay exactly where they were, and when you switch the plugin\nback on it offers to re-apply everything with one click. Or you skip it and do it yourself. Your call.<\/p>\n\nFree, for people<\/h4>\n\n
Not affiliated with anyone named here<\/h4>\n\n
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Will this hurt my Google ranking?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
Does it slow my site down?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
I am on nginx. Is it still worth installing?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
Does it work with a caching plugin?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
Will it break Elementor or Yoast?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
Can I still let AI assistants link to my site?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
Does it delete AI API keys I have already saved?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
wp-config.php<\/code> or your server environment cannot be touched by any plugin at all; this one names them so\nyou at least know they are there.<\/p><\/dd>\nWhat happens to my files if I deactivate or delete the plugin?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
.htaccess<\/code> and robots.txt<\/code>, byte for\nbyte, and reactivating offers to put them back in one click. Your settings and your dated declaration record\nare kept in the meantime, untouched.<\/p>\n\nWhy is it called AI Blackout?<\/h3><\/dt>\n
1.0.0<\/h4>\n\n
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