AI Deny
AI companies crawl the open web to train their models and power AI search. AI Deny gives you a simple way to say no. It adds Disallow rules for more than 30 known AI user agents to the robots.txt that WordPress already serves. Nothing is blocked until you choose. Block every one of them, or go down the list and pick only the ones you want to keep out. Each crawler comes with a short note on who runs it and what it’s for, so you’re never guessing. What you get 30+ AI crawlers, ready to block. GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, PerplexityBot, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent and more. A toggle for every bot. Choose crawler by crawler under Settings → AI Deny. Plain-English descriptions. See who operates each crawler and what it collects before you decide. Nothing written to your server. Rules are added through WordPress’s own robots.txt filter, so there’s no file to manage. Works with “Discourage search engines.” Your AI rules still appear when that setting is on. A noai, noimageai meta tag on every page, for crawlers that look for it. Translation ready. Why block AI crawlers? Your work, your call. Decide whether your writing, photos and products end up in someone else’s training data. A lighter server load. Aggressive crawlers can hammer a site with requests, slowing it down for the people you actually built it for. Less bandwidth spent on bots that send you little or no traffic in return. A straight answer about robots.txt robots.txt is a request, not a lock. The major AI companies say their crawlers respect it, and that covers most of the traffic you’ll see. A bot that chooses to ignore robots.txt won’t be stopped by this plugin, or by any robots.txt plugin. If you need that, block it at your host, firewall or CDN. Built by Code For Broke AI Deny is made and maintained by Code For Broke, an independent web developer working with marketing teams and small businesses on WordPress and fast, secure websites. Questions and suggestions come straight to me through the support forum.
ParseLess
ParseLess serves your WordPress content as clean Markdown to AI crawlers (via User-Agent detection) and on manual ?format=md requests. Same URL, same content, none of the theme chrome, navigation, widgets, or page-builder scaffolding that AI bots and CLI tools don’t need. It also exposes /llms.txt for the emerging AI-indexing standard, so models know where to find your content. Agents can request Markdown the standard way — an Accept: text/markdown header, or a .md address — and every page advertises its Markdown version so they can discover it without being told. You can also declare in robots.txt how AI systems may use your content: search, generated answers, and model training, each independently, with optional RSL licence terms. Who is this for? 1. Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or any CLI that feeds your own site content into an LLM. If you’ve ever piped a blog post into Claude or ChatGPT for analysis, rewriting, or summarization, you’ve watched it burn through tokens parsing nav menus, footer markup, and CSS classes that have nothing to do with your content. A typical WordPress page measured live: ~19,800 tokens of HTML for ~975 tokens of actual content — a 20x reduction just by stripping the theme. Heavy page-builder sites (Elementor, Divi) routinely hit 100x or more. That’s the difference between fitting a handful of pages in a context window and fitting dozens. Just append ?format=md to any post URL and pipe it straight into your tool of choice: curl https://yoursite.com/my-post/?format=md | claude "summarize this" 2. Site owners getting “high resource usage” warnings from their host because AI bots are hammering the site. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and a dozen others crawl WordPress sites constantly. Each request renders your full theme, runs widget queries, loads page-builder assets, and ships hundreds of KB of HTML per page — most of which the bot discards before extracting the actual text. ParseLess intercepts these crawls and serves a tiny Markdown payload instead. You keep the AEO/SEO benefit of being indexed by AI search, without paying the server cost of rendering your full theme for every bot hit. Typical impact on AI bot traffic (measured on real WordPress pages): 95%+ less bandwidth per crawled page (typically 15–30x smaller; e.g. a 79 KB page → 4 KB. Heavy page-builder sites see 100x+) ~60–80% fewer database queries per request ~60% lower peak PHP memory per request ~50–80% faster Time To First Byte (measured 54% on a content-heavy page, 67% on a short one) On a site with 500 posts crawled monthly by major AI bots, that’s roughly gigabytes → tens of megabytes of monthly bandwidth and a fraction of the cumulative PHP execution time Numbers vary by theme and content. Heavier setups (Elementor, Divi, Avada) see the biggest savings; lightweight themes see less dramatic but still meaningful gains. The conversion is cached as a transient, so repeated bot hits cost almost nothing. How it works AI crawlers are detected by User-Agent and served Markdown automatically — no configuration required. Humans, search engines, and unknown bots receive your normal HTML output. ParseLess never affects what real visitors see. The ?format=md query parameter works on any post URL for manual preview or CLI piping. /llms.txt is published at your site root with a list of available content for AI indexers. Conversion happens once per post and is cached. Subsequent requests serve a single transient read. Features Automatic Markdown for known AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai, and more) Manual preview and CLI access via ?format=md on any post URL /llms.txt endpoint for AI-indexing standards Respects noindex flags from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and Genesis Skips private, draft, password-protected, and trashed posts Works with all public post types (configurable) Optional YAML frontmatter (title, URL, author, date, categories, tags, excerpt) Transient-based caching with configurable TTL Settings page at Tools → ParseLess for detection mode, bot list, cache TTL, post types, and llms.txt control Per-post meta box with Markdown preview and copy-to-clipboard Extensible via filters: md4ai_bot_list, md4ai_blocked_bots, md4ai_supported_post_types, md4ai_excluded_post_types, md4ai_markdown_output, md4ai_cache_ttl, md4ai_should_serve_markdown, md4ai_llmstxt_max_posts, md4ai_llmsfull_max_bytes, md4ai_sitemap_max_posts, md4ai_okf_endpoint, md4ai_okf_concept, md4ai_okf_max_posts, md4ai_rsl_terms_url, md4ai_rsl_xml, md4ai_log_request Privacy and data collection When logging is enabled (off by default), ParseLess records the following for each Markdown request: Post ID, URL, and request timestamp The full User-Agent header A salted SHA-256 hash of the requester’s IP address (the raw IP is never stored) Matched bot identifier, bytes served, and whether the response came from cache IP hashes cannot be reversed from an email address, so the WordPress privacy exporter/eraser tools will report no personal data on demand. Logs are pruned daily according to the configured retention window (7/30/90/365 days, default 30). Site owners can disable logging or click “Delete all logged requests” at any time from Tools → ParseLess.
