Baseline Labs Connector

AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others) do not run JavaScript. They read the raw HTML your server returns and move on. So schema added by client-side JavaScript is invisible to them. This plugin fetches the schema.org JSON-LD that Baseline Labs has already generated for each of your pages and injects it server-side into the page <head>, inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> block - exactly where a non-JavaScript crawler will find it. It is a thin reflector: it does not generate schema and has no schema logic of its own. Baseline Labs generates and stores the schema; the plugin simply reflects it into your HTML. It never cloaks. The same schema is served to every visitor, human or bot. Serving crawlers different content than people is against search-engine guidelines and is not something this plugin will ever do. What it does

• Hooks wp_head and injects the JSON-LD for the current URL.
• Caches each page's schema (12–24h) so the API is only called on a cache miss, and clears that cache within minutes when Baseline regenerates your schema.
• Corrects or supplies your page titles and descriptions, when you switch that on in your Baseline account.
• Fails open: if the API is unreachable or has no schema for a page, the plugin emits nothing and never breaks the page.
• Reports injection failures back to your Baseline account so you can see them.

Requirements

• A free Baseline Labs account and an API key. Schema generation and injection are included on the free plan for one site; paid plans raise the page limit and refresh your schema more often.

1. Upload the plugin and activate it.
2. Go to Settings → Baseline Connector.
3. Paste your Baseline API key and save.
4. Click Connect & verify this site.
5. That's it - schema appears in your pages as Baseline generates it.

WP-CLI: wp baseline set-key bl_xxx && wp baseline enable && wp baseline connect

2.12.3

• Traffic reporting is now opt-in: off on a new install until you switch it on in Settings. Sites that already had it on keep it.
• The visitor tracker no longer falls back to a cookie.
• The tracker script is enqueued through WordPress instead of printed by hand.
• Class names carry the full Baseline_Connector_ prefix.

2.12.2

• Performance: a scanner sweeping your site for hundreds of addresses at once can no longer tie up your server while the plugin records it. Each request used to wait up to two seconds to record itself after the page was sent; scanner requests now never wait, and are recorded once per address per minute, up to 30 addresses a minute. AI crawler visits wait at most a fifth of a second. On a small hosting plan that is the difference between a scan your visitors never notice and one that uses up every worker the site has.
• During such a burst some scanner requests, and occasionally a crawler visit, go unrecorded rather than slow your site down.

2.12.1

• Security: a corrected page title is now escaped before WordPress prints it into your page's title tag, and any markup is removed from corrected titles and descriptions. WordPress prints a title supplied this way exactly as it receives it, so the plugin now does the escaping itself.
• Security: the schema written into your pages is encoded so that no text inside it can end the script tag it sits in, whatever the text says.
• Missing pages no longer ask Baseline for schema or metadata. A page that returns "not found" has none, and scanners probing hundreds of missing addresses were costing a lookup and a stored entry for each one.

2.12.0

• Each crawler request now tells you which network it came from, so your dashboard can say whether a run of visits was one crawler or several, and whether something calling itself Googlebot really came from Google. Your visitors' addresses still never leave your site: the address is shortened on your own server to the surrounding block of 256 addresses, which names a network rather than a machine, and only that block is sent.
• Scanners are reported now, so their 404s stop making your site look broken. Every site on the internet is swept for files like .env, .git and wp-login.php by software that never reads a page, and it usually claims to be an ordinary browser - so it was invisible here while its missing-page errors counted against you. Requests for those paths are reported whatever they claim to be, and your dashboard files them as suspicious traffic rather than as readers. Your own visits to your login page are not included: while you are signed in, none of this is recorded.

2.11.0

• If Baseline is unreachable, your pages stop waiting for it. Each page load already gave up after two seconds, but every page whose stored copy had expired paid those two seconds again. After three failed attempts the plugin now stops calling for two minutes and serves the schema it last held, so an outage at our end costs your visitors nothing after the first few seconds. It reconnects on its own.

2.10.0

• Publishing or editing a post now tells Baseline immediately, so your schema is refreshed for that page within minutes instead of on the next full crawl of your site. It is one small message about the one page, sent after your save has already finished, at most once every thirty seconds.
• Because Baseline now knows which pages changed, it stops re-reading the ones that did not. A large site was being fetched thousands of times a day to find a handful of edits; it is a handful of requests a day now, plus one full pass a week to catch theme and menu changes.
• Fixed: when Baseline regenerated your schema or corrected a title, the plugin cleared its own copy but not your page cache, so pages already stored by WP Rocket, LiteSpeed and the like kept serving the old version until they expired on their own. Your page cache is now cleared too, at most once every ten minutes.

2.9.1

• On a site running no SEO plugin, a page whose description Baseline supplies now carries exactly one description tag - ours. Before this, a theme that printed its own left the page with two.

2.9.0

• Your page titles and descriptions can now be corrected or filled in by Baseline. Switch it on in your Baseline account under Rolling metadata; the plugin asks for each page's title and description and prints what comes back, through Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO where one of those is running, and on its own where none is. Settings → Baseline Connector shows whether it is on. There is no switch here, because your account is where you chose it.
• A site that no AI crawler has visited yet now checks in with Baseline once an hour. Everything the server tells this plugin - that your schema was regenerated, that your metadata changed, which of the above is switched on - rides back on the batch of crawler requests it sends, so a site with no crawler traffic to send never heard any of it.
• The daily site sync now includes each page's own description, so Baseline compares its suggestions against what your pages really say rather than against a copy read through your page cache.

2.8.0

• Verification no longer fails on a cached site. Baseline verifies your site by reading a tag this plugin prints in your pages, and a page cache was handing it the copy of your homepage saved before the plugin was installed - so a correctly installed plugin reported "tag not found", repeatedly. The plugin now clears your page cache before verifying, offers Baseline a second address no cache stores, and says plainly that a cache or Cloudflare can take up to half an hour rather than showing a red failure.
• Regenerated schema appears within minutes instead of up to a day. Each page's schema was cached for 12 to 24 hours with nothing to tell it that Baseline had produced a new version, so a regeneration was invisible for half a day. The plugin is now told, and clears the cache when it happens - and after the plugin itself is updated.
• The visitor-measurement script is now excluded from JavaScript optimisation in WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache and Autoptimize, and carries its reporting address on the tag. A minifier that copied the script onto your own domain, combined with delayed JavaScript, could leave every visit unrecorded with nothing to show for it.

2.7.0

• Updates now come from the WordPress.org plugin directory like every other plugin you have installed. The self-updater this replaces fetched new versions from our own server, which the directory does not permit and which you should not have to trust us about. If you installed an earlier copy from a zip rather than from the directory, install it once from the directory to keep receiving updates.
• Request data read from the server (user agents, referrers, query strings) is now unslashed and sanitised at the point it is read rather than where it is used.

2.6.0

• Crawler hits are now checked against the IP ranges each AI company publishes, so "GPTBot read you 400 times" is a claim someone verified rather than a user agent string taken at its word. No IP address leaves your site or is stored anywhere - the check happens on your server against a list downloaded to it, and only a true/false result is reported.
• People who arrive from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI answer engines are now recorded by your server as well as by the tracker script, so visitors with JavaScript blocked stop going uncounted.
• When a page cache is in front of WordPress, the plugin now names the layer and tells you exactly why it hides traffic - whether the page is answered by your webserver, by a drop-in before plugins load, or at a CDN edge - instead of one generic sentence. If your cache is set to let crawlers straight through, it says that too, because then your bot counts are nearly complete even though the cache is there.

2.5.0

• Site Intelligence. Once a day the plugin now sends your site profile (WordPress/PHP version, language, permalink style, the "discourage search engines" flag, active theme and SEO plugins) and the list of published pages with their titles and modified dates. Your Baseline dashboard uses it to show which published pages AI crawlers have never read, which ones you have edited since they last crawled, and to warn you when a WordPress setting is quietly hiding you from search and AI engines. Public facts only - no drafts, no private content, no post bodies.

2.4.0

• One install now covers both halves of the picture. As well as recording the AI crawlers that read your site, the plugin measures the people AI answer engines send you - no second snippet to paste. It is the same toggle, and the same no-IP, no-cookie promise.
• Cache detection now runs by itself, twice a day. It only ever ran when somebody opened the settings screen, so most sites reported "we could not determine whether a cache sits in front of you" forever - and your crawler counts were caveated more heavily than they needed to be.

2.3.2

• A fresh install shows its first schema in minutes, not an hour. The "no schema yet" result is now cached for 5 minutes instead of 60, and a successful verification clears the schema cache, so pages viewed before connecting no longer pin the empty state.

2.3.1

• The settings screen no longer rejects every valid API key. Key validation now uses an endpoint that accepts API keys; it previously hit a session-only endpoint, so saving a correct key reported "validation failed: Not authenticated".

2.3.0

• Works on a free Baseline account. Schema generation and injection no longer need a paid plan.
• The baseline-channel marker is now stored during channel registration, so it appears even if domain setup fails afterwards.
• Detects silent delivery loss. Baseline accepts bot-hit batches without saying whether the token was recognised, so a wrong token used to discard every hit while this screen showed "sent". The plugin now asks once a day what Baseline actually received, and warns when the two disagree.
• Warns when bot reporting is on but the site has no token yet.

2.2.0

• The plugin can now update itself. Before this, an installed copy stayed on whatever version it was first given - a fix could be shipped and never reach anyone.
• Emits a single unified baseline-channel marker carrying ownership, channel, version and capabilities. A site running only the free bot reporting previously announced no channel at all, because the old marker was written alongside the schema and skipped when injection was off.

2.0.0

• Renamed from "MarkupSchema Schema Injector" to "Baseline Connector".
• WP-CLI namespace is now wp baseline. wp markupschema still works as a deprecated alias and will be removed in the next release.
• Default API host is now https://baselinelabs.ai. Override it with the BASELINE_CONNECTOR_API_BASE constant in wp-config.php.

1.0.0

• Initial release.