Spyglasses – AI Traffic Analytics

Yes, you’ll need to sign up for a Spyglasses account at spyglasses.io to get an API key.

No, Spyglasses is designed to be lightweight and only processes requests from detected AI agents and referrers. It has minimal impact on your site’s performance.

Spyglasses collects information about AI-related traffic, including user agent, IP address, requested URL, HTTP headers, and referrer information. No personal information about your regular visitors is collected.

AI agents are bots that browse your site directly (like Claude-SearchBot or Perplexity-User). These have distinctive user-agent strings and can be blocked if desired.

AI referrers are regular human visitors who clicked a link to your site from AI-generated content (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity). These are detected by their referrer information and are never blocked because they’re real people.

You can view all data collected in your Spyglasses dashboard. Log in to your account at spyglasses.io to access your dashboard.

Bot blocking settings are managed centrally through your Spyglasses dashboard. You can block bots at several levels: all AI model trainers, by category, by subcategory, by bot type, or by specific pattern. Blocked bots receive a 403 Forbidden response. Note that AI referrer traffic (humans from AI platforms) is never blocked.

All blocking settings are now managed centrally through your Spyglasses dashboard at spyglasses.io/app . This allows you to configure settings once and have them apply to all your WordPress sites using Spyglasses.

Yes, Spyglasses is fully compatible with all major caching plugins including LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, and others. The plugin automatically sets appropriate cache headers to ensure accurate detection while maintaining optimal performance.

By default, Spyglasses automatically syncs agent detection patterns daily from our API. This ensures you always have the latest patterns for new AI agents and referrers. You can manually sync patterns from the settings page or disable automatic syncing if you prefer.

If you encounter problems, enable “Debug Mode” in the Spyglasses settings page. This creates a detailed debug log at wp-content/uploads/spyglasses-debug.log with information about plugin operations, pattern loading, and detection events.

You can also enable WordPress debug logging by adding these lines to your wp-config.php: define('WP_DEBUG', true); define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

After reproducing the issue, check both the Spyglasses debug log and the WordPress debug log (usually at wp-content/uploads/debug.log ) for error messages. Look for messages starting with “Spyglasses:” and share them with support if needed.

Remember to disable debug logging when you have fixed the issue, as excessive logging can affect site performance.