Dark Visitors
Dark Visitors

Dark Visitors

gavindarkvisitors
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Track and control artificial agents crawling your website including AI assistants, scrapers, and other bots.

Track and Control Artificial Agents Crawling Your Website

This plugin connects your website to Dark Visitors.

Half of your traffic is invisible to you. Analyze, protect, and optimize your content for the hidden ecosystem of AI assistants, scrapers, and other bots swarming across the internet.

Features

  • Keep Your Robots.txt Updated Automatically: Use the API or WordPress plugin to generate a robots.txt that continuously stays up to date with the latest known agents, which are changing every day.
  • Protect Your Content From Scraping: Block agents who try to ignore your robots.txt rules.
  • Expose Your Hidden Traffic With Agent Analytics: Get realtime insight into the increasingly meaningful activity of artificial agents that other analytics platforms hide from you.
  • Spot Emerging AI Trends: See when people are using AI assistants or autonomous agents to access your website on their behalf.
  • Identify Top Agents and Pages: See which agents visit your website the most, and which of your pages they’re most interested in.

Demos

Links to demos can be found on the home page.

Further Detail

As mentioned above, this is the official plugin for 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.

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.

Very Useful Plugin

By Dennis Bareis (dbareis) on August 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.

Begun my review...

By hackrepair on July 29, 2024

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

Super useful!

By ghking on June 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!

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
  1. Install and activate the Dark Visitors plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory
  2. Sign up for Dark Visitors and create a new project for your website.
  3. 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.

Reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars

  • Version: 1.12.0
  • Last updated: 3 days ago
  • Active installations: 200
  • WordPress version: 5.0
  • Tested up to: 6.6.2
  • PHP version: 7.0