Business. Scoop » New Free WordPress Plugin Shows Which AI Bots Are Crawling Your Website, And Which Ones Are Faking It
Press Release – Forge CreativeAny script can call itself GPTBot and most tools will log it as OpenAI, says Roger McSaveney, General Manager at Forge Creative. Auckland digital agency Forge Creative has. . .
Press Release – Forge CreativeAny script can call itself GPTBot and most tools will log it as OpenAI, says Roger McSaveney, General Manager at Forge Creative. Auckland digital agency Forge Creative has released Forge AI Bot Log, a free WordPress plugin that shows website owners which AI crawlers are visiting their site, checks whether those bots are really who they say they are, and lets owners block any of them with one click. AI crawlers from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity visit websites every day. Some collect pages as training data for AI models. Others index content for AI search, or fetch pages on behalf of someone using a chatbot. Most site owners have no idea any of this is happening, and the monitoring tools that do exist all share the same weakness. They read the bot’s user agent string and take it at face value. That matters because any scraper can put “GPTBot” in its user agent and show up in your logs as OpenAI. Forge AI Bot Log checks each visit against the crawler’s own published infrastructure using forward-confirmed reverse DNS, the same technique Google, OpenAI and Anthropic recommend for confirming their own crawlers. Every hit gets labelled Verified, Spoofed or Unverified. “Any script can call itself GPTBot and most tools will log it as OpenAI,” says Roger McSaveney, General Manager at Forge Creative. “We built this for our own clients. They kept asking whether AI companies were taking their content, and the honest answer was that nobody could tell them, because the tools out there just take bots at their word. When you verify the traffic properly, you find some of what looks like OpenAI or Anthropic is actually something else using their name. ”Key features of the free plugin include:Verified and Spoofed labels. Every tracked hit is checked with forward-confirmed reverse DNS, so impersonators get flagged instead of trusted. A live dashboard of AI bot visits over the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, plus a full searchable log and CSV export. A plain English directory of 23 bots from 15 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Amazon, Apple and Meta. Each entry explains who owns the bot, whether it trains AI models on your pages, powers AI search or fetches pages live, and whether it obeys robots. txt. One-click blocking that writes the robots. txt rules for you, plus a hard-block . htaccess snippet for the bots known to ignore robots. txt. A monthly email summary, optional alerts when a new AI bot first shows up, and a report on which of your pages AI bots read most. Bots-only logging. Human visitors are never logged, and there are settings for IP anonymisation and data retention. The plugin also keeps the different jobs AI bots do separate. OpenAI’s training crawler, its search indexer and its live page fetcher are listed as three different bots, so a publisher can opt out of model training and still show up in AI search results. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are handled as the opt-out settings they really are, which means owners can decline LLM training without affecting their normal Google Search rankings. “We’re not telling anyone to block AI,” says McSaveney. “For a lot of New Zealand businesses, getting cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity is where the next customer comes from. But you should get to make that call yourself, and right now most site owners can’t, because they can’t see the traffic. Have a look at what’s actually visiting first, then decide. ”Forge AI Bot Log is free and open source under the GPL, and is available now from the official WordPress plugin directory. It follows LeadSource and TrueConversion, the lead tracking plugins Forge Creative released earlier this year. About Forge CreativeForge Creative is an Auckland-based digital agency providing web design, branding, copywriting, search engine optimisation and digital marketing services. The agency develops and manages websites and advertising campaigns for New Zealand businesses. More at forge. co. nz. AvailabilityDownload Forge AI Bot Log (free):https://wordpress. org/plugins/forge-ai-bot-log/Forge Creative:https://forge. co. nz/Content Sourced fromscoop. co. nzOriginal url