AI Deny

Description

Blocking AI crawlers from your website is essential for maintaining both its performance and privacy. When left unchecked, these bots can strain server resources, causing slow load times for real users, and may harvest data beyond your intended audience. This creates potential risks, including the exposure of sensitive information and a compromised user experience.

AI Deny offers an effective and straightforward solution to this problem. The plugin works by automatically configuring your website’s robots.txt file to disallow over 30 of the most common AI user-agents known for crawling websites. This ensures that unwanted bots are prevented from accessing your site, reducing server load and safeguarding privacy.

With AI Deny, you can easily block all pre-configured user-agents or customize the list to suit your specific needs. By giving you control over which bots are allowed or denied access, AI Deny helps you protect your content, conserve bandwidth, and deliver a faster, more secure experience for your audience.

AI Deny

Installation

Upload AI Deny to your blog and activate it.

Toggle User-Agents in Settings > AI Deny

Reviews

January 10, 2026
Allowing AI crawlers is highly unlikely to increase your search engine ranking or the number of visitors to your site. Most likely the opposite, as they consume your bandwidth and CPU resources, making your site slower and less responsive for genuine visitors and search engine crawlers (sometimes causing 500 or 503 errors). We found OpenAI (GPTBot) was crippling our site making repeated requests every second or so, navigating a calendar widget (from Events Manager plugin) some 800 years into the future. I started to implement the robots_txt filter to block some AI crawlers, then had a look to see if there was already a plugin to achieve this… And found this, which does the job perfectly. It blocks 3 times as many AI crawlers than I knew about, can be confirgured to allow individual crawlers, and includes a description for each one to help you decide.
Read all 1 review

Contributors & Developers

“AI Deny” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “AI Deny” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

0.1.1

January 9 2025

  • Fix: Translation loading triggered too early
  • Fix: Display AI Deny rules even when “Discourage search engines” is enabled
  • Enhancement: Add development environment support

0.1.0

December 4 2024

  • Beta release