Crawlune – AI Crawler Controls

Crawlune audits how easily your published content can be extracted, controls AI crawler access, and publishes machine-readable summaries. These features run locally and do not require an account or license. It does not measure or promise citations by answer engines. Implemented:

• Per-agent AI crawler controls for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, distinguishing training crawlers from retrieval crawlers
• Three named positions to start from — Open, "Answers yes, training no", Closed — each setting every crawler and the matching content signals in one go
• robots.txt directives generated from those rules
• Optional refusal (403) for a crawler you blocked that requests pages anyway — off by default, and the requests keep being counted
• A count of people arriving from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot — click-throughs, which is a floor under citations rather than a measure of them
• Content signals (search, ai-input, ai-train) in robots.txt, which state what a page may be used for rather than who may fetch it — off until you set them, and a declaration rather than an enforcement
• The same refusal of AI training repeated as a noai response header, a robots meta tag and a W3C TDM reservation at /.well-known/tdmrep.json
• Markdown for agents: every page also available at its own address with .md on the end, and on request via Accept: text/markdown — off by default, and honouring the same exclusions as llms.txt
• IndexNow submission when you publish or update a page — off by default, and honouring the same exclusions as llms.txt
• An extractability audit scoring content on liftable answer blocks, question-shaped headings, external citations, quotable statistics, modification dates and thin content
• A site-wide visibility report aggregating that across all published content, worst pages first
• /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, generated from your real content and refreshed when you publish
• Admin screens for the report, a per-page work-list behind every number, crawler controls, llms.txt and licensing, plus REST routes for the same
• Background analysis of your content, so none of the above is computed while you wait for a page to load
• Structured data for your pages when no SEO plugin is already providing it
• AI rewriting of a page's opening into a liftable answer block, reviewed as a word-level diff before anything is applied
• AI rewriting of section headings toward the question they answer, keeping each heading's level and its existing link address
• Generated FAQ data for pages that answer questions they never ask, where every proposed answer has to be text already on the page — anything else is discarded before you see it
• Applying a rewrite without disturbing surrounding block markup, and reverting a run from a journal
• License activation against the WP Shelf licensing service

Hosted rewriting requires a WP Shelf license and an enabled generation service. Hosted rewriting is enabled for activated licenses. Public licensing enrollment is not yet open. Local audits and crawler tools do not depend on it. Not included:

• Citation tracking — whether a given engine actually quoted you. Counting people who click through from an assistant is implemented and is a different thing: it is a floor under citations, not a measure of them

Crawlune does not claim it will get your site cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews. That is not measurable from inside WordPress and will not be claimed. What it reports is what it measured about your content.

0.64.2

• No visible change: on a site with no licence key, the plugin no longer reads the licence server's address on every admin screen that checks licence state. It was one database query per screen whose result could never be used. The shared WP Shelf code now checks for a key first.
• Fixed: the action links in a WP Shelf table row (for example a link next to a button) sat a few pixels apart vertically. They now share one line. This comes from the shared WP Shelf screens, and Crawlune's copy had not yet taken it.

0.64.1

• Fail a rewrite whose result is not text, instead of offering a fragment of program output for review as a heading or an answer.
• Say plainly that such a failure is ours to fix rather than showing a raw code.

0.64.0

• Save the crawler settings on the Visibility screen without reloading the page: the form posts to the plugin's own REST route, reports the result in place, and redraws the screen from what was actually stored.
• Keep the plain form post working unchanged for browsers with JavaScript turned off, through the same save.

0.63.0

• Show, under a finished rewrite run, how the score of each page it changed has moved: the median score before the run, measured on the copy Crawlune kept of each page, against the score from the page's latest analysis.
• Name pages that have not been analysed since the run instead of showing them as zero, and count pages put back or edited since separately.
• Say why a FAQ data run leaves page scores as they were.

0.62.6

• Recover interrupted dispatches and partial result delivery without issuing duplicate paid work.
• Preserve saved results during a service-review pause and resume only on an explicit request.
• Continue recovering older multi-batch runs without requiring an open admin screen.
• Restore the complete rewrite history for each run, including large runs, while protecting newer rewrites.
• Preserve quotes and backslashes in saved article text and generated FAQ data.
• Report partial undo results accurately and keep unsuccessful restores available to retry.
• Show one-time allowances without a reset date, and display resets only when the service confirms renewal.

0.62.5

• Escape assembled admin HTML at output while retaining form controls and nonces.
• Enforce non-HTML content types and nosniff for text and Markdown endpoints.
• Simplify JSON encoding flags while retaining JSON-LD script-injection protection.

0.62.4

• Guide installations without a local license key to settings before creating a hosted rewrite run; existing runs and free tools remain available.
• Fixed: malformed service acknowledgements now use bounded retries instead of leaving a rewrite run waiting indefinitely.
• Fixed: unavailable results stop retrying after six hours even when the service reports the job complete; valid late results still arrive normally.
• Improved: failed batch messages explain the next step without implying that allowance was refunded.

0.62.3

• Renamed the plugin to Crawlune – AI Crawler Controls, including its translation domain.
• Secured JSON-LD output against script-element breakout in page metadata and FAQ content.
• Added the submitting WordPress.org account to the contributor credits.

0.62.2

• Fixed hosted generation and result polling on fresh installs with no saved server URL.
• Improved request-input sanitization and documented temporary CSV stream handling.
• Included shared JavaScript sources and standalone build instructions in the plugin ZIP.
• Clarified external-service requests and privacy disclosures.
• Verified clean installation and removal on WordPress 7.1.

0.62.0

• Added JavaScript search, sorting and pagination for admin data tables.
• Navigate between plugin subpages asynchronously, with Back/Forward support. Earlier release notes are included in CHANGELOG.md.