Block Chat GPT via robots.txt for WordPress

This plugin adds lines to the virtual robots.txt file that WordPress creates automagically if the file is not present physically on the server to block the OpenAI ChatGPT-User bot that is used by plugins in ChatGPT to crawl websites. Here is the information about the ChatGPT-User bot. It also blocks the the GPTBot user agent that may potentially be used to improve future models.

Please be aware of what this plugin does exactly: If you activate the plugin it will add some lines to the robots.txt file to tell Open AI Chat GPT bots (ChatGPT-User + GPTBot) to not to crawl and index parts of this website.

Please only activate this plugin if you know what you’re doing.

What can I do with this plugin? This plugin adds the necessary lines to the virtual robots.txt file that WordPress creates automagically to block the OpenAI ChatGPT-User bot that is used by plugins in ChatGPT to crawl websites + the GPTBot user agent that may potentially be used to improve future models.

What ideas is this plugin based on? None. After the launch of the OpenAI ChatGTP plugins that crawl websites, we needed a fast solution to add these lines to the robots.txt file and this was the solution we coded.

In August 2023 OpenAI added information about the GPTBot so we added this user-agent to the plugin.

What is the robots.txt file? The robots.txt file is a plain text file located at the root folder of a domain (or subdomain) which tells web crawlers (like Googlebot) what parts of the website they should access and index.

The first thing a search engine crawler looks at when it is visiting a page is the robots.txt file and it controls how search engine spiders see and interact with the web pages.

System requirements PHP version 7.4 or greater.