Referenced – AI Crawler Tracking

WordPress plugin that counts visits from known AI crawlers and posts hourly day totals to Referenced.

It is a reporter only: it writes nothing to your pages, and records no visitor data (no IP addresses, cookies or user accounts). For each known crawler it keeps a count per bot, path and day in one small table of its own. You need a Referenced account and a connection token; until a token is saved, nothing is sent anywhere.

Install and connect

1. Download the plugin zip from Referenced, under Settings → Connections, and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. Activate it.
2. In Referenced, open Settings → Connections and create a WordPress token.
3. In WordPress, open Settings → Referenced and paste the token.

The first report arrives within about an hour of your site's next visits (WordPress runs scheduled tasks on traffic). Send now on the settings screen sends at once.

In WordPress

• Settings → Referenced: the connection (the token shows masked to its last four characters once saved), the status of the last send, Send now, the last 7 days of crawler visits and most visited pages, and Disconnect, which removes the token and stops all reporting.
• Dashboard widget: AI crawler visits over the last 7 days and the connection state.
• Connect notice: a dismissible prompt on the Plugins and Dashboard screens until a token is saved.

What is sent

Only after a token is saved: the bot name, the page path, the date, the visit count, the plugin version, the WordPress version and your site's home URL, once an hour and on Send now. No visitor IP addresses, cookies, user agents or personal data. See the privacy policy and terms.

Pages served from a full-page cache or a CDN never reach PHP, so they cannot be counted: the numbers are a floor, not an exact total.

Credits and licence

GPL-2.0-or-later (see LICENSE). Bundled third-party material is listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt: Geist fonts (SIL OFL 1.1), Heroicons and Lobe Icons (MIT) and a Simple Icons mark (CC0). The logos belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify crawlers.

Development

Developer commands: composer test (Pest), composer lint (WordPress Coding Standards), bin/build-zip (release zip, built from the committed tree with assets/ and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt included, so commit first; the shipped copy lives in the Referenced repo under public/downloads/).