Most AI crawlers appear in server logs, but Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended never do
Despite being widely referenced in robots.txt files, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended never actually send HTTP requests to websites, making them invisible in server logs. In contrast, nine real AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity do send identifiable user-agent strings and can be tracked in WordPress access logs. Vendors confirm that index-building bots generally honour robots.txt directives, but user-triggered fetchers — such as ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User — may ignore those rules because a human initiated the request. This means a page blocked from AI training can still be fetched moments later to answer a live user query. WordPress site owners can monitor all nine documented crawlers without a plugin by adding a small script to the mu-plugins directory that logs matches to a capped database option.
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