CHEQ Essentials vs JTZL's Bot Maze

As a website owner, one of the biggest challenges you face is dealing with invalid traffic. Invalid traffic (27% of direct and organic traffic on average in 2022) refers to any non-human or fraudulent activity, such as bots, click farms, and other forms of automated traffic. This can not only damage your site’s reputation but also result in lost revenue, slow performance, and skewed data that damage your decision-making. CHEQ Essentials is here to help. We use advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze user behavior and distinguish between legitimate and invalid traffic. With this plugin, you can automatically monitor your website traffic in real time and identify any suspicious patterns or behavior. The plugin also provides detailed reports and analytics that can help you better understand your traffic and identify any potential issues. Once the plugin detects invalid traffic, it can take immediate action to prevent further damage. This may include blocking IP addresses on Google Ads, redirecting traffic to a 403 page, or implementing other measures to prevent bots and other automated traffic from accessing your site. Overall, this is an essential tool for any website owner who wants to secure and protect their site from fraudulent activity and ensure a safe and reliable user experience. With CHEQ Essentials, you can rest assured that your site is protected from invalid traffic and other forms of online fraud. You will need an active CHEQ Essentials subscription to use this WordPress plugin.

JTZL’s Bot Maze protects your WordPress site from unwanted AI crawlers and scrapers by planting invisible trap links that only bots will follow. When a bot enters the trap maze, it gets lost in an ever-expanding maze of realistic-looking fake pages while it quietly builds a suspicion score based on its behavior. How it works: Trap link injection — Invisible links are added to your real pages. Legitimate visitors never see them, but bots following every link on the page will enter the trap maze. Lazy maze generation — Trap pages link to more trap pages, generated on demand. The deeper a bot goes, the more time it wastes. Bot scoring — Each trap page visit adds suspicion points. Deeper traversal earns bonus points. Once a threshold is reached, the visitor is flagged as a bot. Blocking and tarpitting — Flagged bots can be blocked outright (403), served decoy pages (light tarpit), or slowed down with a deliberate delay (full tarpit). Crawler verification — Known search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) are verified via reverse DNS and exempted from scoring. Features: Zero impact on legitimate visitors — trap links are hidden from humans and search engines Configurable injection method (content, footer, or both) Adjustable scoring thresholds and blocking behavior robots.txt integration to signal trap paths as disallowed Analytics dashboard showing bot activity, top IPs, and score distribution Blocked Bots detail page showing full user agent, score, visit history Optional comprehensive tracking mode to monitor blocked bot persistence Automatic log retention and maintenance via WP-Cron Privacy policy suggestion for GDPR compliance Geographic heat map of bot activity by country with two GeoIP provider options MaxMind GeoLite2 local database — all lookups on your server, GDPR-friendly (recommended) ip-api.com external API — simple setup, no license key required Optional AbuseIPDB reporting for eligible blocked public IP addresses, with a one-press catch-up for blocked bots that carry no report yet Lightweight — minimal footprint, geographic tracking is fully optional Third-Party Services Every external service listed below is optional and off by default. No data is sent to any of them unless a site administrator explicitly enables the corresponding feature. MaxMind GeoLite2 (Recommended) When MaxMind GeoLite2 is selected as the GeoIP provider (Settings > Bot Maze > Geographic Tracking), the plugin downloads the GeoLite2-Country database from MaxMind and performs all IP-to-country lookups locally. No visitor data leaves your server. What is downloaded: The GeoLite2-Country database (~60 MB), downloaded weekly via WP-Cron from download.maxmind.com. What is sent to MaxMind: Only your license key during database downloads. No visitor IP addresses are shared. Requires: A free MaxMind license key from maxmind.com/en/geolite2/signup. Service website: https://www.maxmind.com License: GeoLite2 databases are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Terms of service: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2/eula ip-api.com When ip-api.com is selected as the GeoIP provider, the plugin sends visitor IP addresses to ip-api.com to resolve their country of origin. This data is used to display a geographic heat map of bot activity in the admin dashboard. What is sent: The visitor’s IP address only, over unencrypted HTTP. When it is sent: At the time a trap page visit is recorded, only while this provider is selected. Service website: http://ip-api.com Terms of service: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal Privacy policy: ip-api.com does not log queries from the free API endpoint. Note: The free tier only supports HTTP (not HTTPS). If your site must comply with GDPR, use the MaxMind local database option instead. Geographic tracking is off by default and requires explicit opt-in by a site administrator. AbuseIPDB Reporting AbuseIPDB reporting is off by default. It requires explicit enablement plus an administrator-owned AbuseIPDB account and API key from the API dashboard. Protect the API key like a password. An address is queued for reporting in exactly three situations: A non-verified crawler’s persisted score crosses the configured blocking threshold. An address that is already blocked requests a trap page while reporting is on, which is fresh evidence it is still crawling the maze. An administrator presses the catch-up button on the Blocked Bots page, which covers blocked addresses AbuseIPDB has not accepted a report for, whatever the reason. Every queued address must also be publicly routable. Private, loopback, reserved, documentation and multicast addresses are never reported, because AbuseIPDB only accepts reports about addresses reachable on the public internet. Verified search engine crawlers are never scored in the first place, so they are never candidates. The catch-up in (3) reports each address against the time it was actually last seen, rather than the time the button was pressed, and covers addresses seen within your configured data retention period (Settings > Bot Maze > Maintenance, 30 days by default). That is the period you have declared this evidence meaningful for, and the same period after which the plugin deletes the record, so the catch-up offers exactly the blocked addresses your site still holds evidence for. It reports up to 500 addresses per press. In all three cases the report sends only the public IP address, category 19 (Bad Web Bot), the time of the observation being reported, and a generic explanation for security reporting. It sends these four fields over HTTPS to the AbuseIPDB service. It never sends the user agent, referrer, trap URL, session, score, or traversal depth. The plugin limits reports to once per IP address in any 24-hour period. A queued report that cannot be delivered for seven days is abandoned. Delivery runs in the background through WP-Cron, so reports may wait on low-traffic sites and are not real-time. Disabling reporting or clearing the key stops delivery and deletes queued reports. The current free Individual plan includes 1,000 IP checks and reports per day. See AbuseIPDB pricing; your account limit may differ. Review AbuseIPDB’s terms and privacy policy before enabling reporting. Cloudflare IP Ranges When the Trusted Client IP Header is set to Cloudflare (CF-Connecting-IP) (Settings > Bot Maze > Trusted Proxy), the plugin fetches Cloudflare’s published edge IP range lists from cloudflare.com to keep the trusted-proxy allowlist current without any manual action. What is requested: Two public plain-text files — cloudflare.com/ips-v4 and cloudflare.com/ips-v6 — fetched weekly via WP-Cron. What is sent: No visitor or user data. The HTTP request reveals only your server’s own IP address to Cloudflare. Service website: https://www.cloudflare.com Terms of service: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ This fetch only runs while the Cloudflare trusted client IP header is selected. If the fetch fails validation, the previously stored list (or a bundled fallback) is kept — a failed response never narrows or widens the trusted set.