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What’s new

Release notes for the free plugin and Pro. The free plugin’s full history is also on WordPress.org.

Free

1.6.3

  • Added: a dedicated "Pro" page in the menu describing what the separate Pro add-on adds, alongside the existing short mentions in Settings and in the emails. Disappears automatically once Pro is active.
  • Changed: the Pro add-on mentions now link to its pricing page instead of straight to checkout.

1.6.2

  • Fixed: Access Control blocks are now built once at plugin load and reach the robots.txt served to bots, not just the preview shown in the admin. A build taken during development had regressed to admin-only construction, so blocked bots were never actually kept out.
  • Fixed: reverse-DNS verification no longer labels a genuine bot "Spoofed" when the address checked belongs to an unrecognised proxy rather than the bot itself; it's reported "Unverified" instead, as in earlier releases.
  • Fixed: uninstalling now also clears the scheduled new-bot-alert event, so nothing is left pending after removal.
  • Performance: the reverse-DNS verification cache is larger (500 to 5,000 entries) and results are trusted for longer (1 hour to 6 hours), so busy sites crawled by Google, Amazon, Apple or Meta from many different addresses don't force repeated live DNS lookups.
  • Added: a mention of the Forge AI Bot Log Pro add-on — a fuller description in a panel at the bottom of Settings, and a single quiet line at the bottom of the Dashboard, Activity Log, Bot Directory and Access Control screens, plus the monthly summary and new-bot alert emails. Hidden automatically once Pro is active, and can be turned off everywhere at once with the `forge_ai_bot_log_show_pro_notice` filter.

1.6.1

  • Added: extension hooks (actions and filters) so add-ons such as Forge AI Bot Log Pro can attach reports and capture without duplicating the core plugin. No change to tracking behaviour.
  • Added: the access-log importer now exposes each parsed line, including the referrer, to add-ons, and no longer counts a bot visit twice when it was already recorded as it happened. A line for the same bot and page within two minutes of an existing record is skipped.
  • Added: a warning when a caching plugin or a managed host (WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, Pantheon) is active, explaining that bot visits to cached pages are not seen by WordPress, with the bot names to paste into the cache's exclusion setting or the alternative of importing the server log file.
  • Redesigned: every screen now uses one consistent layout of headings, number cards, panels, tables and coloured tags, shared with add-ons, with a "?" icon beside every number and column that needs explaining. Hover, tab to it or tap it for a plain-language explanation.
  • Added: the dashboard chart splits bot visits per day into live reads, search crawls, training crawls and agents.
  • Changed: bot types are named in plain words: Live read, Search crawl, Training crawl, Agent.
  • Changed: "Most-visited pages" counts address variants of the same page together, so /about, /about/ and /about/?ref=1 are one row.
  • Fixed: Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are now labelled as opt-out names rather than bots. They are names used in robots.txt to control AI training and never visit a site themselves. They can still be blocked under Access Control but are no longer offered for recording.
  • Fixed: tables no longer squash neighbouring panels on narrower screens; wide tables scroll sideways instead.
  • Fixed: when the older pre-release "AI Bot Log" plugin was also active, its stylesheet loaded on this plugin's screens instead of this plugin's own, so help text showed inline and the layout looked broken. This plugin now uses its own asset names and switches the older plugin's styles off on its screens.

1.3.0

  • Added: xAI's Grok crawlers — GrokBot, xAI-Grok and Grok-DeepSearch — to the bot directory, with an honest note that much of Grok's fetching uses disguised browser user agents no tracker can attribute.
  • Security: forwarding headers (X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, CF-Connecting-IP) are no longer trusted from arbitrary clients — previously a request could forge a vendor IP in a header and have a fake crawler labelled Verified. Cloudflare's header is now honoured only when the request genuinely arrives from Cloudflare's published ranges, and generic proxy headers only behind a local reverse proxy.
  • Fixed: hits captured by the optional early logger (mu-plugin) now record the visitor's IP address and are labelled "No check" instead of being mislabelled "Unverified".
  • Fixed: the early logger now honours the excluded-paths and IP-anonymisation settings, matching the main logger.
  • Performance: the early logger no longer reads the signature list for ordinary human traffic.
  • Removed: the cross-promotion email settings and the optional remote promo feed. Existing promo settings are cleaned up automatically.

1.2.4

  • Fixed: OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity crawlers are now verified against the vendors' published IP-range lists instead of reverse DNS, which those vendors don't support — genuine ClaudeBot/GPTBot hits were previously shown as Spoofed/Unverified.

1.2.3

  • Documentation: expanded and clarified the readme, with new FAQs on blocking, verification and robots.txt handling.
  • Documentation: corrected the verification description — hits are labelled Verified, Spoofed or Unverified, not only the first two.
  • Documentation: clarified that robots.txt directives are merged into the robots.txt WordPress serves, and that a physical robots.txt file in the site root overrides them.
  • Internal version constant bumped to match the plugin header, so browsers re-fetch the plugin's CSS and JavaScript once. No other functional changes.

1.2.2

  • Fixed: genuine bots visiting over IPv6 are no longer incorrectly marked "Spoofed" by DNS verification.

1.2.1

  • Removed the remote bot-list auto-updater; the bundled bot list now updates via plugin releases.

1.2.0

  • Added an External services disclosure for the optional promo feed.
  • Added a Settings shortcut to the Plugins screen.
  • New-bot alert emails are now sent on a background schedule instead of during the visit.

Pro

1.2.1

  • Fixed: styles now load correctly when the older pre-release AI Bot Log plugin is also active. Requires Forge AI Bot Log 1.6.1 or newer.

1.2.0

  • Redesigned: the AI Referrals report, Pro Settings and the Pro section on the dashboard now use the free plugin's shared layout, so Free and Pro look the same everywhere.
  • Added: a "?" icon beside every card and column heading, with a plain-language explanation that includes the real settings in use (for example, the 10-minute window for "After a live read").
  • Added: a collapsible "How these numbers work" guide at the top of every report.
  • Changed: the company table groups its columns under "Visitors sent by AI" and "AI bot visits", with the three "before this visit" columns spelled out in full.
  • Changed: the visitor log explains where each visitor came from, the link tag that identified the assistant, and whether they were counted in the browser, by WordPress or from the log file.
  • Changed: drill-down cards on an assistant or bot now name the company they refer to.
  • Changed: the free plugin's cache warning now links to Pro's fuller instructions, and disappears once the server log file is being imported.
  • Fixed: page addresses no longer break one letter per line in narrow table columns.
  • Requires Forge AI Bot Log 1.6.0 or newer.

1.1.1

  • Fixed: on a site where the visitor's own address cannot be seen (an unusual proxy setup), two different people using the same browser were merged into a single visit, so real referrals went missing. Nothing is merged now when visitors cannot be told apart.
  • Changed: the report and the settings screen now say that visits from logged-in users are left out on purpose, and to test from a private window. This is the usual reason a test click seems to go missing.

1.1.0

  • Added: automatic site check. The plugin fetches its own home page to find out whether a cache is answering requests, and in automatic mode chooses browser-side tracking when one is found.
  • Added: scheduled reading of the server log file every hour, recovering bot visits and referrals that a cache hid from WordPress.
  • Added: WP Rocket integration that keeps AI bots out of the cache so their visits reach WordPress. For other caches, the exact names to paste are shown.
  • Added: every referred visit is labelled with what the same company's bots did on that page beforehand: a live read just before, an earlier crawl, or nothing on record. Shown on the overview, per company, per page and in the log.
  • Added: trending alerts. An email within the hour when an AI assistant reads one page far more than usual.
  • Added: full data download (zip) with every table as CSV plus a notes file explaining every column and every limitation.
  • Changed: settings screen split into the basics and an advanced section, written in plain language.
  • Requires Forge AI Bot Log 1.5.0 or newer.

1.0.0

  • Initial release. Server-side tracking of human visits referred by AI assistants (Referer header plus utm_source / form parameters), optional browser beacon for cached sites, and access-log mining via the free plugin's importer.
  • Reports by date range (today, yesterday, last 7/30/90 days, this/last month, this/last year, all time, custom), filterable by AI company, bot or assistant, and page.
  • Per-page and per-company comparison of live-retrieval bot fetches against referral visits, as an honest proxy for being cited.
  • Referral log with CSV export; monthly summary email gains an AI-referrals section.