Questions, answered
What does my site need for the hosted tracker?
A place for one script tag in your pages, and one of: Cloudflare in front of the site (for the Worker, whatever runs behind it), PHP, or Node with Express. The tag counts visits from AI engines; the Worker or snippet reports AI bots with their real IP address, so each one can be checked. The privacy page says exactly what each sends.
Can I use it now?
The hosted tracker is in a private beta on our own sites. Join the waitlist and we'll email you once when it opens to more. On WordPress, the free plugin works today.
Does a referred visit mean a crawl got me cited?
No. Crawl requests and referred visits are counted separately. A referred visit is a person who clicked through from an AI engine; it is counted once for that engine and shown next to each of its bots. AI answers that cite you without anyone clicking through can't be seen from your site.
What does “claimed” mean?
Anyone can put “GPTBot” in a user agent. Hits are checked against the IP lists the AI companies publish, with reverse DNS as a fallback for Amazonbot and CCBot. A hit that can't be traced to its company is marked claimed. Meta, ByteDance, Cohere and some others publish no way to check, so their hits are always claimed, which doesn't prove they are fake.
Is the plugin really free?
Yes. The WordPress plugin is free and GPL-licensed, with no account, no key and no limits.
Does the plugin block bots?
No. It can add rules to the robots.txt WordPress generates, which well-behaved bots follow, and that is off until you tick a box. It never blocks requests itself, so bots that ignore robots.txt, and impostors using a real bot's name, won't be stopped.
Will it slow my site down?
It reads the user agent and referrer of requests WordPress already handles and writes one row only when an AI bot or an AI referral shows up. Bot checks and pruning run once a day in WP-Cron, not while a page loads.
My site uses a page cache or a CDN.
Requests served from a full-page cache never reach WordPress, so they aren't logged and your counts will be lower than your server logs. Behind a proxy or CDN the plugin sees the proxy's address; pass the real visitor address with the aiccr_client_ip filter so verification works.
I have a robots.txt file on disk.
A real file replaces the one WordPress generates, so the plugin's rules won't appear. The report warns you when this happens; copy the rules into your file or remove it.
What is the RSL license.xml?
Really Simple Licensing is a standard for publishing your terms for AI use. Turn it on and the plugin serves /license.xml and points to it from robots.txt. It states your terms; it doesn't enforce them.
Can I add bots or engines?
Yes, with the aiccr_bots and aiccr_engines filters.
Is it on WordPress.org?
Not yet. For now download the zip and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. It is the same code.