WindCodex ScraperBlock – Block AI Scrapers & Bots from WordPress & WooCommerce

ScraperBlock blocks requests that match the built-in default bot list or your custom user-agent signatures. The default list includes 50+ known AI scrapers and content crawlers. Bots not on the list are not blocked unless you add their signature manually.

The default list includes GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Google AI training), ByteSpider (ByteDance), CCBot (Common Crawl), Diffbot, PerplexityBot, YouBot, and more. The list is maintained and updated with new bot signatures regularly.

No. The default bot list targets AI training and content scraping crawlers only. Google Search bot (Googlebot), Bing bot (bingbot), and other standard search engine crawlers are not in the default list and are not blocked. Your SEO and search indexing are unaffected.

robots.txt is a voluntary standard – compliant crawlers will respect it, but malicious or poorly configured bots may ignore it. For stronger enforcement, use runtime blocking (PHP layer) or .htaccess blocking (Apache) in addition to robots.txt directives. ScraperBlock lets you enable all three simultaneously.

Runtime blocking intercepts requests at the PHP level – it works on any web server (Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed, etc.) but runs after the server has already accepted the connection. Apache .htaccess blocking runs at the web server level before PHP executes, making it more efficient for high-traffic sites on Apache. Both can be enabled together.

No. .htaccess blocking is Apache-specific. For Nginx and LiteSpeed sites, use runtime blocking and robots.txt mode – both work on any server.

noai and noimageai are meta tag directives that signal to AI crawlers that the page's content and images should not be used for AI training. They follow the same convention as the existing noindex and nofollow meta robots tags. Compliance varies by crawler – ScraperBlock outputs these tags on all pages (or per-page if configured) so that compliant crawlers respect your opt-out.

Yes. ScraperBlock adds a meta box to the post and page editor. You can enable or disable protection individually per page, overriding the global settings.

The Logs panel shows the last 50 blocked events with IP address, user-agent, URL, reason, and timestamp. The Dashboard widget shows a basic count of blocks in the last 24 hours. Advanced analytics with full historical data, filtering, and CSV export are available in ScraperBlock Pro.

Yes. Price scrapers typically use identifiable user-agent strings. If a competitor's price bot is in the default block list or you add its user-agent signature manually, ScraperBlock will block it at the PHP layer before any content is served. For WooCommerce stores, this prevents competitors from automatically monitoring and undercutting your prices.

Content poisoning is an advanced technique where detected bots are served subtly incorrect or corrupted content instead of a hard block – degrading the quality of scraped data without alerting the scraper operator. Content poisoning is a ScraperBlock Pro feature. The free version uses hard blocking (403 or redirect response) for all matched bots.

Go to Settings > ScraperBlock > Logs. The block log shows the last 50 blocked events with IP address, user-agent, URL path, and timestamp. The Dashboard widget shows a count of blocked requests in the last 24 hours. If you see high volume from unfamiliar user-agents not yet in the default list, copy the user-agent string and add it to your custom signatures. Advanced analytics with full historical data and filtering are available in ScraperBlock Pro.

Rate limiting applies per IP address and is tuned to catch high-frequency automated requests – not normal browsing behaviour. Real visitors do not make hundreds of requests per minute the way scrapers do, so the threshold should not affect them under normal conditions.

ScraperBlock's runtime and robots.txt/meta modes work independently of Cloudflare. If you use Cloudflare's bot management features, they complement each other – Cloudflare blocks at the edge, ScraperBlock blocks at the application layer for any traffic that reaches your origin server. .htaccess mode applies only to requests that reach your Apache server, same as without Cloudflare.

ScraperBlock is a lightweight plugin. User-agent matching is a string comparison that runs early in the request lifecycle and exits immediately for legitimate traffic. The performance overhead for real visitors is negligible.