AI Blackout - Block AI Crawlers & Stop AI Training

No. Search engines sit on a protected list of 18 identifiers, and every rule is tested against that list before it is written. A rule that would catch one of them is thrown away. If you choose to block an AI crawler that affects whether you appear in AI assistants' answers, the plugin says so plainly and asks you to confirm that one separately.

No. Install it, answer one question, press Save. The plugin works out what your server supports and writes the right things in the right places. You never have to touch robots.txt or .htaccess yourself, and you cannot break your site by picking the wrong answer.

No. Nothing is loaded on the front end: no scripts, no stylesheets, no per-page database queries. Blocked crawlers are turned away by a user-agent check and nothing else.

Yes, and that is the default. Crawlers that collect training data get refused. The ones that fetch a page because a real person asked a question are allowed through. Every crawler is listed separately with what it actually does, so you can go through them one at a time if you want to.

No. Their AI features are switched off using the off-switches those plugins ship themselves, and nothing is written into their settings. Turn it off here and everything is exactly as it was.

Yes. robots.txt and the WordPress-level refusal both work on nginx with no setup. The only thing you cannot have without your host's help is the server-level rule, and the plugin writes that rule out for you along with the message to send them.

The robots.txt and server-level layers do, because they run before your cache. The WordPress-level refusal does not, because a page served from cache never reaches WordPress at all. The plugin detects your cache and tells you which layers that affects, rather than leaving you to work it out.

No. Existing keys are left alone. They simply cannot be used while AI is switched off. Keys set in wp-config.php or your server environment cannot be touched by any plugin at all. This one names them so you at least know they are there.

They go back to how they were. Deactivating removes the rules byte for byte, and reactivating writes them again from your settings. Deleting removes the lot by default: rules, settings, the activity log table, the scheduled cleanup job. No leftovers, no orphaned database rows, no mystery lines in your .htaccess six months later. There is a checkbox on the Legal declaration tab that keeps your settings and dated record through a delete. Worth ticking if you have been publishing a reservation of rights for a while, because that record is the only proof of when yours started and it cannot be recreated later. It keeps information, not protection: once the plugin is gone, nothing is blocking anyone either way.

Because that is literally what it does. The site goes dark to AI. It cannot get in through your crawlers, and it cannot run inside your WordPress. Both halves are the same idea.

A review is the biggest thing that helps another site owner find this before their content gets scraped. If it is working for you, leaving one takes thirty seconds.