Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker vs OpenStation

Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker monitors visits from 30+ AI crawlers and gives you visibility into how bots interact with your site. See which bots visit, what pages they crawl, and catch misbehaving bots with a built-in logging-only honeypot. Lightweight, privacy-first, and fully functional out of the box. Free forever — no artificial limits on bot detection. Tracked Bots (30+): GPTBot / ChatGPT-User / OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI) ClaudeBot / Claude-Web / anthropic-ai (Anthropic) Googlebot / Google-Extended (Google / Gemini) bingbot (Microsoft / Copilot) PerplexityBot (Perplexity) DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba), Mistral AI Applebot-Extended (Apple Intelligence) Meta-ExternalAgent (Meta AI) Bytespider (ByteDance) CCBot (Common Crawl), Amazonbot, YouBot, DuckDuckBot AI2Bot, Diffbot, Timpibot, PetalBot SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, DataForSeoBot, MJ12bot, DotBot Features: Lightweight Bot Detection (30+ Bots) Hooks into WordPress init with a priority-1 action. Bails immediately on non-AI User-Agents — zero performance cost for human visitors. All 30+ bots tracked. Dashboard with Charts Clean dashboard with trend chart and provider breakdown pie chart (Chart.js, bundled locally). Summary cards show total visits, unique bots, pages crawled, and daily averages. No external dependencies. Bot Activity Table Dedicated tab showing all detected bots with visits, bytes transferred, 24h sparklines, verification status, and honeypot hit counts. Crawled Pages See which pages bots visit most, which bots crawl them, and when they were last seen. Honeypot Endpoint (Logging Only) A CSS-hidden, aria-hidden, rel=nofollow link is injected in the footer. Only raw link-extracting bots will follow it. Visits are logged for transparency. Active defense (blocking, tarpit, rate-limit, decoy, shadowban) is reserved for the paid build. Bot Verification Reverse DNS (FCrDNS) verification for major bots — confirms Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc. are actually who they claim to be. Privacy First IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a per-install salt before storage. Raw IPs are never saved. Includes WordPress Privacy API exporter and eraser hooks so data-subject access and erasure requests can flow through the standard WordPress Tools → Personal Data workflow. AI Discovery Layer Serves ai-plugin.json (a discovery manifest that tells visiting AI agents the site is monitored) and llms.txt / llms-full.txt (text content authored by the admin via WordPress pages with slugs llms-txt and llms-full-txt) at the site root. Data Retention Bot visit data is retained for 30 days. Older records are automatically pruned via WP-Cron. External Services This plugin connects to the following external services: Reverse DNS Lookups The bot verification feature performs reverse DNS (FCrDNS) lookups using PHP’s gethostbyaddr() and gethostbyname() functions to verify that bots are who they claim to be (e.g., confirming a request claiming to be Googlebot actually originates from Google’s network). These lookups send the bot’s IP address to your server’s configured DNS resolver and the authoritative DNS servers for the IP address’s reverse DNS zone. Under some privacy regimes, IP addresses may be considered personal data. This feature runs automatically when a known AI bot visits your site and cannot currently be disabled via the admin UI (a filter hook crawlantix_enable_verification is available for developers). No other external services, third-party APIs, or remote requests are used by this plugin. All analytics data is stored locally in your WordPress database. Chart.js is bundled locally — no CDN requests are made. Privacy Policy Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker is designed with privacy as a core principle: Bot traffic only. The plugin only tracks automated bot traffic identified by User-Agent strings. Human visitors are not tracked and no cookies are set. No raw IP addresses stored. All IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a per-install random salt before storage (or AUTH_SALT when defined in wp-config.php). The original IP address cannot be recovered from the hash. Note: pseudonymous IP hashes may still be considered personal data under GDPR. Data stored per bot visit: IP hash, User-Agent string, requested URL, HTTP referrer URL, request method, timestamp, and derived fields (bytes transferred, bot verification status). Referrer URLs may contain personal data depending on the referring site. WordPress Privacy API integration. The plugin registers exporter and eraser callbacks with WordPress core, so data-subject access and erasure requests filed through Tools → Personal Data flow correctly. No external data transmission. All analytics data remains in your local WordPress database. No data is sent to Crawlantix or third-party services. The only external communication is DNS lookups for bot verification (see External Services above). Data retention controls. Bot visit data is automatically pruned after 30 days. Administrators can delete all collected data on uninstall via the “Delete Data on Uninstall” Settings toggle. For sites that require a formal privacy policy disclosure, you may note: “We use the Crawlantix AI Bot Tracker plugin to monitor automated AI bot traffic to our site. This plugin records bot User-Agent strings, pseudonymous IP hashes, pages visited, referrer URLs, and timestamps for detected bot traffic only. Raw IP addresses are cryptographically hashed before storage. No human visitor data is collected.” Premium Version Crawlantix also offers paid tiers at crawlantix.com for site owners who need active bot defense in addition to monitoring. The paid build adds the following features on top of everything in this free version: Protect tier Active honeypot responses: HTTP 403 block, tarpit (random 5–25s delay with worker-exhaustion safeguards), rate limit 429, decoy content, shadowban. Auto-block of repeat honeypot offenders, with configurable thresholds. Per-IP response rules — apply a chosen response strategy to specific IP hashes (up to 200 rules). Custom honeypot paths (up to 5) with a reserved-route safety list. Email alerts for honeypot hits and parameter explosion patterns. Robots.txt trap entries that catch non-compliant scrapers. Optional override that suppresses the WordPress core /wp/v2/users REST endpoints (username-enumeration hardening, off by default and easy to opt back in). Optimize tier Full REST API at /wp-json/ai-tracker/v1/ with API key authentication and 13 endpoints (status, stats, page, trends, bots, top-pages, report, export, alerts, honeypot, crawled-pages, etc.). GeoIP location tracking with MaxMind GeoLite2. Crawl Analytics tab with deeper traffic-quality metrics. Extended data retention up to 365 days. Scale tier Backup & restore — export all data as JSON; import with merge or replace modes. Unlimited retention. Priority support. The paid build is a drop-in upgrade: same plugin slug, same database tables, same option keys, so all your historical bot data carries over with no migration step on your part.

wp-admin forgets. OpenStation doesn’t. You know the moment. You’re deep in a post and you need one image from the Media Library. You click over, find it, click back, and everything you had going is gone. Your scroll position, your half-typed thought, the three other things you had queued up in your head. That’s not a bug you hit. That’s the design. wp-admin shows you one screen at a time, and every navigation throws the last one away. It has worked this way since 2003, like a fridge that empties itself every time you close the door. WordPress has rebuilt almost everything else. The editor, the site editor, the patterns, the styles. The admin’s one-screen-at-a-time model is the layer nobody touched. OpenStation touches it. Install it and admin screens become draggable, resizable windows. Edit a post while the Media Library sits open next to it. Drag an image from one window straight into the other. Keep comments open in the corner. Reload the browser and your window layout — open pages, positions, sizes, and window states — comes back where you left it. OpenStation itself is free, GPL, and opt-in per user. One click in the admin bar turns it on for you. One click turns it off. Nobody else on your site sees anything change, and deactivating the plugin restores the classic admin exactly. No Core patches and no lock-in. Optional AI providers may charge for their service. Built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. Work on more than one thing at once Admin pages open as windows, including pages added by most other plugins. Drag them, resize them, snap them, tile them, minimize them to a taskbar. The admin menu becomes a dock of icons. Two editors open at once is one click away. Never lose your place Moving between open windows leaves each page in place. Across reloads, OpenStation remembers your open pages, window positions, sizes and states, virtual desktops, and focus. Closing a window with unsaved changes warns you first. A desk you can actually put things on Drop posts, media, and links right onto the wallpaper. Sort them into folders. Trash them to a Trash that actually holds things. The stuff you’re working on this week can just sit out where you can see it. One desktop per job Virtual desktops, the way your operating system does them. One for writing. One for the store. One for comment triage. One for that redesign you keep poking at. Switch between them without closing anything. Find anything with Cmd+K The full WordPress command palette, plus slash commands from your plugins, all under one keystroke. Turn on the optional AI assistant and you can ask it things like “which post had the comment asking for the recipe?” and it searches your own content to answer. (Requires an AI provider configured in Settings → Connectors on WordPress 7.0+. Details under “External services” below.) See how your site fits together The Corkboard is an interactive, zoomable map of how your posts, pages, and products link to each other. Pan around it. Find the orphans. Find the hubs. Running a store? Orders, Products, Coupons, and Customers become browsable folders with stock and sale ribbons. Open a customer to see their lifetime spend and what they buy most. Follow a product to its buyers, or a coupon to who redeemed it. Make it yours Wallpapers, from color presets to animated scenes to your own photo. Live widgets pinned to the desktop: drafts, stats, recent comments, a focus timer. Uploadable desktop themes, including a built-in Legacy theme that brings the old WordPress blue back in one click. And Mio, a soft-body desk companion that drifts across your wallpaper and gets bumped around by your windows. Off by default. You’ll turn it on. For developers Extend OpenStation through documented PHP and JavaScript APIs. Register windows, icons, wallpapers, widgets, commands, and settings tabs through stable openstation_register_* PHP APIs and a typed JavaScript API; customize dock items through documented hooks; add AI tools with the WordPress Abilities API. Copy-paste examples live in the developer docs on GitHub. External services No external service is required for OpenStation’s desktop interface. The optional AI Assistant and two user-initiated enrichment features make the external requests described below. AI Assistant The optional AI Assistant sends data to the AI provider you configure in WordPress’s Settings → Connectors (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Generation is routed through WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client, which supplies the credentials stored in Connectors. The plugin never handles an API key itself. With no provider configured in Connectors, no external AI requests are made. When the AI Assistant is enabled and a user invokes it (via Cmd+K or the slash-command palette): What is sent: the user’s prompt, the conversation history for the active session, and tool-call metadata. The plugin’s built-in tools (search_posts, search_pages, search_comments) run WordPress’s native keyword search and may include excerpts of the matching posts/pages/comments in tool results, which are then sent back to the provider as part of the agentic loop. When it is sent: on user-initiated AI requests, and (if an administrator enables “Score new comments with AI”) on comment-save hooks for spam analysis. Posts, pages, and taxonomy terms are not sent automatically. Why it is sent: to obtain model completions and tool-call decisions that drive the AI Assistant. Who provides the service: whichever provider you configured in Settings → Connectors. Which provider (and endpoint) receives the data depends entirely on that configuration. Review the chosen provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). URL shortcut favicons When an authorized user creates a desktop shortcut to an external URL, OpenStation asks that URL for its page HTML and favicon so the shortcut can display the site’s icon. The request is made from your WordPress server and sends the requested URL, the server’s IP address, an OpenStation user-agent string, and normal HTTP request metadata to the operator of that site. This happens only when a user creates the shortcut. The destination site’s terms and privacy policy apply. WordPress.org plugin information When an authorized user opens or refreshes parts of OpenStation’s Plugins window, OpenStation may request public plugin details, update metadata, and review excerpts from WordPress.org. These requests send plugin slugs, the site’s locale, and normal HTTP request metadata to WordPress.org. This information is used only to display and manage plugins. Review the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. OpenStation’s OAuth relay does not contact a service by itself. Third-party plugins that configure the relay may contact their own providers and are responsible for disclosing those services. Credits OpenStation is brought to you by Automattic. The plugin is open source under GPLv2-or-later; contributions are welcome on GitHub. Third-party libraries The plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript library, loaded on demand only when a feature that needs it is in use: PixiJS (MIT License) — used by the Corkboard window, built-in canvas wallpapers (e.g. the animated WordPress logo), the Mio desk companion, and the Inkfall typing game. PixiJS is loaded from the plugin’s own assets/vendor/ directory; no CDN requests are made. Data files The Inkfall game’s word list (assets/games/inkfall/words.txt) is generated from the following sources (attribution also ships in the file’s header): FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA 4.0) — English word-frequency ranking derived from the OpenSubtitles corpus. english-words by dwyl (Unlicense) — used as a validity filter. LDNOOBW English list (CC-BY 4.0) — used as an exclusion filter.