# Royal AI Firewall Launched: See Every AI Agent Hitting Your WordPress Site

> Royal AI Firewall is live on wp.org. Free plugin — shows every AI bot on your site (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot + 50 more) with per-bot controls.

- Canonical: <https://royalplugins.com/blog/royal-ai-firewall-launched/>
- Last updated: 2026-09-18
- HTML version: <https://royalplugins.com/blog/royal-ai-firewall-launched/>

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Royal AI Firewall is live on WordPress.org today. Free forever, no upgrade prompt. See every AI bot hitting your WordPress site — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, ByteSpider, and 50+ others — and decide who gets in with one-click per-bot controls.

[Install from WordPress.org →](https://wordpress.org/plugins/royal-ai-firewall/)

## The Problem: You Can’t See Who’s Reading Your Site Anymore

Every WordPress site on the public web is now visited by AI crawlers. GPTBot pulls content for OpenAI model training. ClaudeBot pulls content for Anthropic model training. PerplexityBot indexes for AI search results. Bytespider feeds ByteDance’s models. CCBot populates the Common Crawl dataset that dozens of other AI systems draw from.

Most site owners have no idea any of this is happening. Server logs are noisy. Analytics tools filter out bots by design. Cloudflare’s bot dashboards focus on threats, not attribution. And the trade-off — block a bot and possibly disappear from ChatGPT search results, allow one and get your content used for training — is invisible until you can actually see it happening.

Royal AI Firewall was built for that gap: a live, plain-language dashboard of every AI agent that hit your site in the last 24 hours, with a per-bot dropdown to allow, block, or log-only each one.

## What Royal AI Firewall Does

Five things, all shipped in the free wp.org release:

- **Live AI bot dashboard.** A hero metric of total AI bot hits in the last 24 hours, a per-bot list with hit count, bandwidth, and a one-click policy dropdown for each row. Click any row to expand a drill-down: top URLs the bot hit, recent activity, and a plain-language note on what blocking would cost you (e.g. “blocking GPTBot may remove your site from ChatGPT search results”).
- **Per-bot policy controls.** Four states per bot: use default policy, always allow, log only, or block. Blocked bots receive a 403 response before WordPress runs any heavy work. Search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, DuckDuckBot) are protected from accidental blocking by default, with a clear override toggle for advanced use.
- **Master “block all AI bots” panic button.** One click, applied at the WordPress layer, no config file edits.
- **Cloudflare setup wizard.** The first-run wizard detects Cloudflare on your site and tells you exactly which CF settings to dial down (AI Audit, AI Labyrinth, custom AI-blocking WAF rules) so this plugin can take over the AI-bot layer, and which settings to keep on (DDoS, managed WAF, SSL/TLS, caching, Bot Fight Mode).
- **MCP / Abilities API activity widget.** If you have [Royal MCP](https://royalplugins.com/royal-mcp/) or any other Model Context Protocol server plugin installed, MCP tool invocations from connected AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) appear alongside HTTP-layer bot traffic on the dashboard.

## Why Cloudflare Compatibility Is a Feature, Not a Footnote

If you’re behind Cloudflare, most existing “block AI bots” guides break something: they tell you to enable Cloudflare’s AI Audit or AI Labyrinth, then leave you unable to see or override the decisions those tools make. Or they tell you to install a WordPress plugin without mentioning that CF is silently intercepting AI-bot traffic upstream, so nothing you do inside WordPress has any effect.

The setup wizard’s Cloudflare screen tells you exactly which CF settings to turn off:

- **AI Audit** → set to “Allow”
- **AI Labyrinth** → OFF
- **Custom WAF rules** blocking AI bots → delete (the per-bot controls in this plugin replace them)
- **Security Level** → Medium or Low

And which CF settings to keep on (they don’t conflict): DDoS protection, managed WAF rules, SSL/TLS, Bot Fight Mode (basic tier), Browser Integrity Check, and caching. Step-by-step click-path with screenshots for each CF setting is in the [Cloudflare Setup Guide](https://royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/#cloudflare-setup). If you want the full explanation of why this split matters, we wrote about it here: [Cloudflare’s Block AI Bots silently breaks MCP](https://royalplugins.com/blog/cloudflare-block-ai-bots-breaks-mcp/).

The dashboard also detects Cloudflare on every admin page load and shows a status card with an honest estimate of how many AI bots may have been filtered by Cloudflare at the edge before reaching WordPress — because if CF is doing 90% of the blocking, you deserve to know that’s where the credit belongs.

## Under the Hood: Free, Self-Hosted, No Phone Home

The plugin makes **no outbound HTTP calls by default**. The bundled bot fingerprint catalog (currently [55 AI bots across 6 categories](https://royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/#bot-catalog): training crawlers, retrieval bots, AI search engines, agent browsers, dataset scrapers, and traditional search engines) ships with each plugin release and refreshes automatically when you update Royal AI Firewall through the standard WordPress plugin updater.

If you want catalogs fresher than the per-release cadence provides, an optional Settings toggle opts in to one HTTP GET per day to `fingerprints.royalplugins.com`. That toggle is off by default. No telemetry, no license check, no license activation, no traffic beacon, no analytics call is ever made — regardless of toggle state. Your data stays on your server.

Log retention defaults to 7 days and is filterable via `raif_log_retention_days` for developers who need a different value. The classifier runs in-process against a pre-compiled pattern list with a hard budget of under 5 milliseconds per request. Logging is buffered and flushed on the WordPress `shutdown` hook (after the response is sent) so the response latency a visitor sees is not affected by database writes.

## Install It in Three Steps

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to **Plugins → Add New** and search for **Royal AI Firewall**. Click Install Now, then Activate.
2. [Walk the 4-step setup wizard](https://royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/#getting-started). It runs automatically on first activation and is skippable from any step. If you’re behind Cloudflare, step 3 is the single best reference for what CF settings interact with this plugin.
3. Open the **AI Firewall** menu in your WordPress admin and wait 2–6 hours for the first AI bot hits to populate the dashboard. Or trigger a manual test with curl: `curl -A "GPTBot/1.2" https://your-site.com/` — you’ll see that hit in the dashboard within seconds.

[Install Royal AI Firewall from WordPress.org →](https://wordpress.org/plugins/royal-ai-firewall/)

## Why It’s Free (and Staying That Way)

Every feature ships in the free wp.org release. There is no Pro version. No paid tier is planned. Updates go through the standard WordPress plugin updater alongside every other free plugin you have installed.

Why? Because a firewall that quietly nudges you to upgrade to see “which bots are hitting you” is not really doing the job. The whole point of the plugin is visibility — and visibility that’s gated behind a subscription is the same problem the plugin exists to solve, just with a different gatekeeper.

## What’s Next

The v1.0 catalog covers 55 AI bots. The categories most in flux are agent browsers (OperatorAgent, ChatGPT-Atlas, Claude-Computer-Use) — a newer class where AI systems drive an actual browser through your site rather than crawling markup. If you’re seeing traffic from something we don’t recognize yet, please open a thread on [our wp.org support forum](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/royal-ai-firewall/) — that’s the fastest way to get a bot added to the classifier.

Cloudflare changed its AI-bot defaults on September 15, 2026, splitting the older “Block AI Bots” and “Managed Robots.txt” toggles into three new categories (Search, Training, and Agent). Sites that had either legacy toggle enabled prior to September 15 were auto-migrated, per Cloudflare’s customer email. For how to configure the new taxonomy alongside Royal AI Firewall, see the [Cloudflare Setup section](https://royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/#cloudflare-setup) of the docs.

Full documentation lives at [royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/](https://royalplugins.com/support/royal-ai-firewall/).

FAQ

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Is Royal AI Firewall really free?

Yes — every feature ships in the free WordPress.org release. No Pro version, no license key, no upgrade prompt, no paid tier planned. Updates flow through the standard WordPress plugin updater.

### How do I install it?

Go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress admin, search for “Royal AI Firewall”, click Install Now, then Activate. The 4-step setup wizard runs automatically on first activation.

### Will this block Googlebot?

No. Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, and DuckDuckBot are protected from accidental blocking by default. To block any of them, you must explicitly enable the “Search engine override” toggle in Settings, which warns clearly that blocking Googlebot removes your site from Google Search.

### Does it work with Cloudflare?

Yes — the setup wizard’s step 3 detects Cloudflare and tells you exactly which CF settings to dial down (AI Audit, AI Labyrinth, custom AI-blocking WAF rules) so this plugin can take over the AI-bot layer, and which to leave on (DDoS, managed WAF, SSL/TLS, caching). The dashboard also shows a Cloudflare visibility status card with an honest estimate of how many AI bots CF may have filtered at the edge before reaching WordPress.

### Does this replace Royal MCP?

No — they solve different problems. [Royal MCP](https://royalplugins.com/royal-mcp/) lets AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) read and write your WordPress content through authenticated tool calls. Royal AI Firewall shows you every AI bot crawling your site at the HTTP layer. They complement each other: if both are installed, MCP tool calls appear in Royal AI Firewall’s dashboard alongside HTTP-layer bot traffic in one unified view.

### Does the plugin phone home?

No, not by default. Out of the box the plugin makes zero outbound HTTP calls. The bot catalog ships bundled with the plugin and refreshes on every plugin update. If you explicitly enable the “Keep catalog updated between releases” toggle in Settings or on the final wizard step, the plugin will then make one HTTP GET per day to fetch a fresher catalog — but only after that opt-in, and only that one call. No telemetry, license checks, or analytics calls are ever made regardless of toggle state.

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## See Every AI Agent on Your Site

Royal AI Firewall is free on WordPress.org. Install it, walk the 4-step wizard, and watch every AI bot hitting your site appear in the dashboard within hours.

[Install from WordPress.org →](https://wordpress.org/plugins/royal-ai-firewall/)