AumCrawl – AI Crawler Control: See and Block AI Bots
Every publisher is now asking the same question and nobody can answer it: is ChatGPT actually reading my site? This plugin answers it. It records every known crawler that reaches your site – AI, search engine, SEO tool, link preview – and shows you who came, when, and which pages they read. Then it
Every publisher is now asking the same question and nobody can answer it: is ChatGPT actually reading my site?
This plugin answers it. It records every known crawler that reaches your site – AI, search engine, SEO tool, link preview – and shows you who came, when, and which pages they read. Then it lets you turn away the ones that give you nothing in return.
AI crawlers are not one thing
Most “block AI” plugins block everything, and that is the wrong move. AI crawlers split into two groups that behave in opposite ways.
Some send traffic back. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Google-Extended fetch a page because a person asked a question, and the answer credits you with a link. Blocking them costs you visits.
Some take and give nothing. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider and the SEO backlink crawlers pull your content into a training corpus or a commercial dataset. No link, no citation, no visitor.
The plugin sorts every crawler into those groups and puts the switch next to the evidence, so you are deciding with numbers in front of you rather than in the abstract.
What it will not let you do
There is deliberately no switch for Googlebot, Bingbot, or the crawlers that build link previews on Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Turning one of those off does real damage, and that belongs in your own robots.txt rather than behind a button you can hit by accident. They are recorded, so you can still see when Google last came by.
Honest about what each control does
- Rules in robots.txt – honoured by every crawler listed in this plugin, and ignored by anything that chooses to. It is a request, not a fence.
- Turning blocked crawlers away – the strongest option. The page is never served. Only works against crawlers that say who they are.
- A “do not train on this” note – the X-Robots-Tag: noai convention. Weak. Some tools read it, many do not. It costs nothing, so it is there, labelled for what it is.
The settings screen shows which of these is genuinely in effect right now. It does not assume a filter worked: it fetches your live robots.txt and looks. If another plugin is replacing the file, or a robots.txt exists on disk, you are told so, told which plugin is responsible, and given the exact lines to paste instead.
