Description

Generate a robots.txt to opt out of AI training. Get realtime analytics on the AI agents, crawlers, scrapers, and other bots visiting your website.

Track AI Agents and Control Bot Traffic

50% of your traffic is invisible to you. Get realtime insight into the hidden ecosystem of artificial agents crawling, scraping, archiving, and gathering intelligence on your website. Protect your content from unwanted AI training by generating a robots.txt that stays up to date with the latest known bots automatically.

Features

Keep Your Robots.txt Updated Automatically: Use the API or WordPress plugin to continuously generate a robots.txt that stays up to date with the latest AI agents.
Protect Your Content From Scraping: Block agents who try to ignore your robots.txt rules. Opt out of LLM training and save server costs.
Expose Your Hidden Traffic With Agent Analytics: Analyze the activity of AI assistants, scrapers, and other bots swarming across your website in real time.
Spot Emerging AI Trends: See when people use AI assistants to use your website for them.
Identify Top Agents and Pages: Find out which autonomous agents visit your website the most, and which pages they’re most interested in.

Demos

Links to demos can be found on the home page.

Further Detail

This plugin connects your website to Dark Visitors. It uses the Dark Visitors API to connect to your account and provide functionality.

By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Screenshots

An overview of all agent activity on the website
A timeline of all agent visits to the website
Insights into an agent’s activity on the website
Insights into agents who are not following the website’s robots.txt rules
Agent details including insight into how many websites are blocking it
A generated robots.txt

Installation

Install and activate the Dark Visitors plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory
Sign up for Dark Visitors and create a new project for your website.
Copy your access token from the project’s settings page, then paste it into the access token field on the plugin’s configuration page.

Your website is now connected to Dark Visitors.

FAQ

Do I need a Dark Visitors account to use this plugin?

Yes. Setting up an account only takes a few seconds. This is where you’ll be able to see insights into agent activity on your website.

Is Dark Visitors free?

Dark Visitors is a freemium service. Most features are free, but you can choose to pay for premium features. More detail can be found on the pricing page.

What are some examples of agents?

Examples include GPTBot, CCBot, Claudebot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, etc. See the full agent list for more.

Why should I care about agents?

There are many reasons. Their activity affects:

Whether your content is used in AI model training
If your users can use AI assistants to access your website
How your pages appear in search engine results
Server resource usage
Etc.

Reviews

nealumphred Novanm 30, 2024

Easy to understand and set up. Keep on keepin’ on …

cotros Novanm 3, 2024 5 replies

Bingbot and googlebot are hitting my site with hundreds of visits per minute and Gavin from support spotted the problem immediately!

Dennis Bareis Dawout 21, 2024

An easy improvement would be to link to the settings page from the plugin entry like other plugins, other than that, in general this plugin and its online dashboard is generally well thought out and useful. My website is small and has limited resources that get overrun by crawlers making it unavailable. This plugin helps identify the culprits and decide if I should block them or not. For free you can block them in robots.txt, as I have a physical file, the plugin won’t touch that but its easy to add manually. It will report those crawlers that ignore the robots file and the paid version will enforce those rules, but I just update “.htaccess” myself. I’m reducing my rating by a star since you won’t get much “Agent Analytics” (per month) and for my tiny site it quickly ran out, we are a NFP so don’t have money to burn on subscriptions. The the description for the plan incorrectly states “Unlimited Agent Analytics” when the plan only includes 100,000 events.

hackrepair Jiyè 29, 2024 1 reply

Please remind me in a month to provide an update on the performance of this plugin on a heavily visited website.

ghking Jen 9, 2024

This is a great plugin. I had no idea how many bots were visiting my website every day. Super interesting insights, and a handy way to keep my robots.txt up to date. Thanks!

Read all 5 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Dark Visitors” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

gavindarkvisitors

Translate “Dark Visitors” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.17.0

Code updates

1.16.0

Code updates

1.15.0

Code updates

1.14.0

Code updates

1.13.0

Code updates

1.12.0

Code updates

1.11.0

Code updates

1.10.0

Code updates

1.9.0

Code updates

1.8.0

Copy changes

1.7.0

Design updates

1.6.0

Code cleanup

1.5.0

Simplified the analytics code

1.4.0

Added the option to block agents

1.3.0

Added a small edge case fix

1.2.0

Updated copy

1.1.0

Added the ability to disable analytics

1.0.0

Initial release