PSB Bot Traffic Controller sits in front of your WordPress site and classifies incoming traffic into five bot categories:
- AI training bots
- AI assistants
- Autonomous AI agents
- Search engine crawlers
- Scraping agents
Each category can be configured independently to block (HTTP 403), rate-limit (HTTP 429 once a configurable per-hour threshold is exceeded), or allow traffic. A global safety-net cap also applies to all detected bot traffic regardless of per-category policy.
Detection runs via a free, zero-dependency regex/User-Agent pattern engine, curated from third-party bot-pattern data (see Credits below).
For performance, bot interception runs as early as possible via a small mu-plugin installed automatically into wp-content/mu-plugins/ — this avoids the cost of a full WordPress bootstrap for traffic that ends up being blocked.
Credits
The bundled bot-pattern data (includes/detection/regex/data/bot-patterns.php) is built from three third-party sources, each under a GPL-compatible license:
- matomo-org/device-detector — LGPL-3.0
- crawler-user-agents — MIT
- ai.robots.txt — MIT
No code from these projects is bundled — only pattern/name/category data, transformed at build time (tools/cmd/build-patterns) into this plugin’s own runtime format.
This plugin makes no outbound HTTP requests and does not integrate with any third-party or external service. Earlier versions of the bundled pattern data included a per-signature producer field (an attribution URL crediting the upstream source of each entry); it has been removed entirely, since it was never fetched or otherwise dereferenced by the plugin at runtime.
Screenshots
Settings page — configure block/limit/allow policy and the per-hour rate threshold for each of the 5 bot categories, plus a global safety-net cap applied to all bot traffic.
Dashboard — mu-plugin install/health status, persistent object cache detection, bot pattern-data version, and a rolling per-category block/limit/allow activity summary.