JTZL's Bot Maze protects your WordPress site from unwanted AI crawlers and scrapers by planting invisible trap links that only bots will follow. When a bot enters the trap maze, it gets lost in an ever-expanding maze of realistic-looking fake pages while it quietly builds a suspicion score based on its behavior.
How it works:
- Trap link injection — Invisible links are added to your real pages. Legitimate visitors never see them, but bots following every link on the page will enter the trap maze.
- Lazy maze generation — Trap pages link to more trap pages, generated on demand. The deeper a bot goes, the more time it wastes.
- Bot scoring — Each trap page visit adds suspicion points. Deeper traversal earns bonus points. Once a threshold is reached, the visitor is flagged as a bot.
- Blocking and tarpitting — Flagged bots can be blocked outright (403), served decoy pages (light tarpit), or slowed down with a deliberate delay (full tarpit).
- Crawler verification — Known search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) are verified via reverse DNS and exempted from scoring.
Features:
- Zero impact on legitimate visitors — trap links are hidden from humans and search engines
- Configurable injection method (content, footer, or both)
- Adjustable scoring thresholds and blocking behavior
- robots.txt integration to signal trap paths as disallowed
- Analytics dashboard showing bot activity, top IPs, and score distribution
- Blocked Bots detail page showing full user agent, score, visit history
- Optional comprehensive tracking mode to monitor blocked bot persistence
- Automatic log retention and maintenance via WP-Cron
- Privacy policy suggestion for GDPR compliance
- Geographic heat map of bot activity by country with two GeoIP provider options
- MaxMind GeoLite2 local database — all lookups on your server, GDPR-friendly (recommended)
- ip-api.com external API — simple setup, no license key required
- Lightweight — minimal footprint, geographic tracking is fully optional
- Upload the
jtzl-bot-maze folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
- Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
- Go to Settings > Bot Maze to configure trap link injection, scoring thresholds, and blocking behavior.
The plugin works out of the box with sensible defaults. Trap pages are generated automatically on first visit.