AWM Bot Redirector vs Botkibble

The AWM Bot Redirector is a technical SEO and infrastructure optimization plugin designed for the modern AI-driven web. As AI agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and others increasingly crawl the web to ingest data, serving them heavy, JavaScript-laden HTML is inefficient and costly. This plugin solves that problem by identifying these agents and transparently redirecting them to the AWM “Dual-Stack” endpoint. Once redirected, the AWM protocol generates a lightweight, structured Markdown manifest of your content. This not only makes it significantly easier for LLMs and AI agents to understand and index your site but also enables Scale-to-Zero infrastructure performance. By offloading the rendering burden for bot traffic, you reduce server compute requirements and improve overall site performance for human visitors. The plugin features deep integration with industry-standard security tools including Shield Security, Wordfence, and All In One WP Security (AIOS), ensuring that bot detection is accurate and fake crawlers are properly identified before any redirection occurs.

AI agents, LLMs, and crawlers have to wade through navigation bars, sidebars, ads, and comment forms to reach the content they want, and every element costs tokens. Cloudflare measured an 80% reduction in token usage when converting a blog post from HTML to Markdown (16,180 tokens down to 3,150). Botkibble adds a Markdown endpoint to every published post and page. Cloudflare offers Markdown for Agents at the CDN edge on Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. Botkibble does the same thing (for free) at the origin, so it works on any host. GitHub Repository Three ways to request Markdown: .md suffix: append .md to any post or page URL (e.g. example.com/my-post.md) Query parameter: add ?format=markdown to any post or page URL Content negotiation: send Accept: text/markdown in the request header What’s in every response: Structured metadata header with title, date, categories, tags, word count, character count, and estimated token count (in YAML frontmatter format, readable by any AI agent) Clean Markdown converted from fully-rendered post HTML (shortcodes run, filters applied) Content-Type: text/markdown and Vary: Accept response headers Content-Signal header for AI signal declaration — defaults to ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=yes — see contentsignals.org X-Markdown-Tokens header with estimated token count Discovery via in the HTML head and Link HTTP header Automatic cache invalidation when a post is updated or deleted Performance: Botkibble writes Markdown to disk on the first request, then serves it as a static file. A built-in Fast-Path serves cached files during WordPress’s init hook, before the main database query runs. No extra configuration needed. Add a web server rewrite rule and Botkibble bypasses PHP entirely, serving .md files the same way a server would serve an image or CSS file: Method Avg. response time Standard HTML 0.97s Markdown (cold, first request) 0.95s Markdown (cached, PHP Fast-Path) 0.87s Markdown (Nginx/Apache direct) 0.11s Serving directly from disk is 88% faster than a full WordPress page load. See the Performance section below for Nginx and Apache configuration. Security: Drafts, private posts, and password-protected content return 403 Forbidden Rate limits cache-miss regenerations (20/min by default) to mitigate DoS abuse X-Robots-Tag: noindex keeps Markdown versions out of search results Link: rel="canonical" points search engines back to the HTML version Cache variants (optional): You can persist alternate cached representations by adding ?botkibble_variant=slim (or any other variant name). Variant caches are stored under: /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/_v/ / .md What it does NOT do: Expose drafts, private posts, or password-protected content Serve non-post/page content types by default Require any configuration. Activate and it works. Why Markdown? HTML is expensive for AI systems to process. Cloudflare measured an 80% reduction in token usage when converting a blog post from HTML to Markdown (16,180 tokens down to 3,150). Cloudflare now offers Markdown for Agents at the CDN edge via the Accept: text/markdown header, available on Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. This plugin does the same thing at the origin, so it works on any host. It also adds .md suffix URLs, ?format=markdown query parameters, YAML frontmatter, static file caching, and server-level offloading. If you use Cloudflare, both share the same Accept: text/markdown header, Content-Signal headers, and X-Markdown-Tokens response headers. Cloudflare currently defaults to Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes with no way to change it. Botkibble defaults to ai-train=no and lets you override the full signal per site via the botkibble_content_signal filter. Performance & Static Offloading This plugin supports static file offloading by writing Markdown content to /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/. Nginx Configuration To bypass PHP entirely and have Nginx serve the files (including variants) directly: # Variants location ~* ^/(_v/[^/]+/.+)\.md$ { default_type text/markdown; try_files /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/$1.md /index.php?$args; } # Default location ~* ^/(.+)\.md$ { default_type text/markdown; try_files /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/$1.md /index.php?$args; } Apache (.htaccess) Add this to your .htaccess before the WordPress rules: RewriteEngine On # Variants RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/uploads/botkibble/_v/$1/$2.md -f RewriteRule ^_v/([^/]+)/(.+)\.md$ /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/_v/$1/$2.md [L,T=text/markdown] # Default RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/uploads/botkibble/$1.md -f RewriteRule ^(.*)\.md$ /wp-content/uploads/botkibble/$1.md [L,T=text/markdown] Even without these rules, the plugin uses a “Fast-Path” that serves cached files from PHP before the main database query is executed. Credits We thank Cristi Constantin (https://github.com/cristi-constantin) for contributing cache variants, URL and SEO improvements, and fixing important bugs.