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manifest / ai / forgemesh-pay-per-crawl

ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl

WordPress plugin: charge AI crawlers and bots per page with x402 USDC micropayments on Base, paid straight to your wallet. Humans and verified search engines read free. Bot analytics in wp-admin.

by ForgeMesh Labs · github.com/forgemeshlabs/forgemesh-pay-per-crawl · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/forgemeshlabs/forgemesh-pay-per-crawl/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
No built-in updater. New versions won't appear under Dashboard → Updates. Install new releases yourself, or let Git Updater track the repository.
Readme github.com/forgemeshlabs/forgemesh-pay-per-crawl ↗

ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl (WordPress plugin)

Charge AI crawlers and bots per page with x402 USDC micropayments on Base, paid straight to your wallet. Humans and verified search engines read free. Full bot analytics in wp-admin.

  • Humans see nothing different. Browsers get the page as always.
  • Verified search engines stay free. Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Applebot are checked by reverse DNS, so SEO is untouched. A crawler that only claims to be Googlebot is treated as a script.
  • AI crawlers, SEO crawlers and scripts get 402 Payment Required with an x402 challenge (v2 header + v1 body) and an MPP challenge. They pay USDC on Base and retry; the page is served only after the payment settles on-chain.
  • You keep 100%. The payer's USDC goes directly to your wallet. No custody, no account, no API key.
  • Analytics. Who is crawling (name, class, verified), how often, from how many sources, which paths, what was paid, every settlement with its transaction link. Start in Monitor mode to see what bots would have paid before you charge.
  • Discovery. Serves /.well-known/x402.json, /llms.txt, /agents.txt and adds lines to robots.txt.

Bot analytics

Install

Download the latest forgemesh-pay-per-crawl-<version>.zip from Releases, upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload, activate, then:

  1. Pay-per-Crawl → Settings: paste your payout wallet (a 0x address on Base), set a price (default $0.01 per page), save.
  2. Watch Pay-per-Crawl → Bot analytics for a day in Monitor mode.
  3. Switch the mode to Charge.

Behind Cloudflare or another proxy? Set the Client IP header so search-engine verification sees the real client address.

How a payment works

  1. A bot requests a page and gets 402 with the price, asset (USDC on Base) and your wallet, in the PAYMENT-REQUIRED header (x402 v2), the JSON body (x402 v1) and WWW-Authenticate: Payment (MPP).
  2. The bot signs a USDC transfer authorization (EIP-3009) and retries with it in a header.
  3. The plugin posts that authorization to an x402 facilitator (PayAI by default, no key needed; any facilitator URL can be set), which verifies it and submits it on-chain. The facilitator never holds funds.
  4. The page is served only when a transaction hash comes back. The hit, payer and hash are recorded.

The plugin never contacts ForgeMesh. Its only outbound requests are to the facilitator you chose, and only when a payment is presented.

Verified

  • Unit tests: php tests/unit.php (keccak vectors, classifier, envelopes, MPP challenge/credential, facilitator flow).
  • Integration: 44 checks on WordPress 7.1 with a mock facilitator (human vs bot, 402 shapes, discovery files, v1/v2/MPP payments, replay, underpayment, admin pages).
  • Real settlements on Base mainnet through PayAI, October 2026: x402 v1 (tx) and x402 v2 (tx).

Development

./build.sh            # builds forgemesh-pay-per-crawl-<version>.zip
php tests/unit.php    # unit tests, no WordPress needed

GPLv2 or later. Made by ForgeMesh Labs.