CHEQ Essentials vs WindCodex ScraperBlock – Block AI Scrapers & Bots from WordPress & WooCommerce

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.

WindCodex ScraperBlock is a free WordPress plugin that blocks AI scrapers, content crawlers, and unwanted bots from harvesting your site. Protect blog posts, product pages, and proprietary content from being fed into AI training datasets – without slowing your site down for real visitors. Setup takes under two minutes: install, enable the protections you want, save. Why Your Site Needs Bot Protection AI crawlers – including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, ByteSpider, CCBot (Common Crawl), and dozens more – continuously scrape WordPress sites for training data. For content creators, WooCommerce store owners, and publishers, this means: Your original content gets harvested and used without permission or attribution. AI training traffic inflates your server load and bandwidth costs. WooCommerce store owners face a specific threat – price bots and competitor scrapers continuously harvest product prices, stock levels, and catalog data to undercut your pricing in real time. Proprietary product descriptions, pricing strategies, and business data are exposed to competitors and AI systems. Scraper traffic can mask real user patterns in your analytics. ScraperBlock gives you practical, layered defences against these threats – all from one settings screen. Free Features Protection Controls * Master protection switch – Enable or disable all ScraperBlock protections with a single toggle. * 50+ default bot signatures – Pre-loaded, categorized list of known AI scrapers, content crawlers, and price bots including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, ByteSpider (ByteDance), CCBot (Common Crawl), Diffbot, PerplexityBot, and more. Maintained and updated regularly. * Custom user-agent rules – Add your own bot signatures, one per line. Target bots not in the default list. Blocking Methods * Runtime user-agent blocking – Intercepts matching bots at the PHP layer before any content is served. Works on all server types. * robots.txt blocking – Automatically injects Disallow directives for blocked bots into your robots.txt file. Signals crawlers to stay away before they visit. * Apache .htaccess blocking – Adds server-level RewriteRule blocks for matched user-agents. Stops bots before they reach PHP (Apache only). AI Opt-Out Meta Tags * noai and noimageai meta tags – Outputs on your pages. Signals AI training opt-out to crawlers that respect meta directives. * Per-page meta control – Override protection settings on individual posts and pages using a meta box in the editor. Enable, disable, or customize protection per page. Monitoring * Basic block log – Stores the last 50 blocked request events with IP, user-agent, URL path, reason, and timestamp. * Live dashboard count – Shows a basic count of blocked requests from the last 24 hours. See activity at a glance without leaving wp-admin. * Basic rate limiting – Limit request frequency from individual IPs to reduce scraper throughput. Who Needs ScraperBlock? Bloggers and content creators – Protect original articles and creative work from AI training scrapes. WooCommerce store owners – Block competitor price scrapers and AI bots that harvest product prices, descriptions, and stock levels to undercut your pricing or feed your catalog into AI systems. News and media publishers – Opt out of AI content aggregation and training dataset inclusion. Membership and course sites – Prevent paid content from being scraped by bots that bypass login pages via API or sitemap traversal. Agencies – Deploy consistent bot protection across client sites. How It Works Install and activate ScraperBlock. Go to Settings > ScraperBlock. Enable the protection modules you want (runtime blocking, robots.txt, meta tags, per-page control). Save settings. Monitor blocked requests in the Logs panel and Dashboard count widget. 🚀 Pro Version Need content poisoning, honeypot traps, behavioural detection, real-time threat feed, geo-based blocking, IP allowlists, block scheduling, and advanced analytics? ScraperBlock Pro is available at windcodex.com ScraperBlock Pro adds advanced features for high-traffic sites and serious content protection: Content poisoning – Serve subtly corrupted content to detected scrapers, degrading the value of stolen data. Honeypot traps – Invisible links that only bots follow – automatically flag and block crawlers. Behavioural detection – Identify bots by traffic pattern, not just user-agent string. Real-time threat feed – Cloud-updated block list with new bot signatures pushed automatically. Geo-based blocking – Block all traffic from specific countries at the application layer. IP allowlists & blocklists – Block individual IP addresses and CIDR ranges in addition to user-agents. Block scheduling – Define time windows when protection is active or relaxed. Advanced analytics – Full traffic breakdown by bot, country, URL, and time range with CSV export. Requirements WordPress 5.8 or higher PHP 7.4 or higher Apache is required only for .htaccess blocking mode. All other modes work on any server. Privacy ScraperBlock stores technical security data (IP address, user-agent string, URL path, block reason, action, and timestamp) in your WordPress database for local monitoring purposes. The free plugin does not require or contact any third-party API. No data is transmitted off your server.