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The SnowSEO plugin handles this. No code, and if the site is already connected for publishing you will not need to copy a key. Requires plugin version 1.4.0 or later, WordPress 5.6+, PHP 7.4+.

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Setup

1

Install and connect the plugin

Install SnowSEO from the WordPress plugin directory, then connect it to your brand under SnowSEO → Settings.Already publishing to this site from SnowSEO? Then this is done.
2

Get the site key

Open SnowSEO → AI Crawlers in wp-admin and click Get site key. The plugin exchanges the key it already holds for its tracking key, so nothing is copied by hand.No SnowSEO connection on this site? Generate a key under Settings → Integrations → Beacon in the SnowSEO dashboard and paste it into the field on that same screen (Save key). Tracking works standalone; it does not require the publishing connection.
3

Switch tracking on

Toggle Tracking to enabled, on the same screen or under Settings → Reading.It is off until you do this, on purpose - once on, the plugin sends visitor IP addresses to SnowSEO, and that is your decision to make rather than a side effect of clicking connect.
Hits appear on the Bot Traffic dashboard within a minute or two of the next crawler visit.

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Check it is working

SnowSEO → AI Crawlers shows four tiles: Visits sent, Waiting to send, Last sent and Site key. Buffered visits upload on a one-minute WP-Cron tick, so Waiting to send should never hold a value for long. If Last sent stays at Never while it climbs, something is blocking the outbound request, and the card says so directly - the heading changes to Nothing has reached SnowSEO yet and the error line names the cause. To force a hit, request one of your own pages with a crawler user agent:

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Page caching

This is the single most common reason WordPress numbers look lower than a raw server log.
WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and most managed hosts answer many requests from a stored HTML file without running WordPress at all. There is an exact reason for it. WordPress includes the page-cache drop-in at line 100 of wp-settings.php and does not register its own shutdown handler until line 166. A cache plugin that serves a stored page and exits from advanced-cache.php finishes 66 lines before WordPress has anywhere to hang a plugin, let alone this one.

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Where tracking runs

The Where tracking runs card on the AI Crawlers screen offers three positions. Each loads earlier than the last: The plugin picks the first by default and tells you when the third is worth it - which is whenever a cache drop-in is present. Choosing it writes a one-line @include_once into wp-config.php directly above the require_once ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php'; line. If wp-config.php is not writable, or the site sets DISALLOW_FILE_MODS, the screen shows the exact line to paste instead.

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Caches in front of WordPress

The Caches in front of WordPress card lists every layer it can detect and what to do about each. Where the cache offers a way to skip its stored copy for a user agent, one button sets it:
  • WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache - handled. (WP Rocket’s rules are anchored to the start of the User-Agent, and every AI crawler string begins Mozilla/5.0, so the entries have to be written (.*)GPTBot(.*). The plugin does that for you; a bare token entered by hand works on a cache miss and silently fails on a hit.)
  • WP Super Cache - not possible. Its “Rejected User Agents” setting only applies when writing the cache, never when serving it, as its own field text admits. Use the wp-config.php position instead.
  • WP Engine, Kinsta, SiteGround, Cloudways - no user-agent exclusion exists. The card generates the request to send their support.
  • Cloudflare - add a Cache Rule matching AI crawler user agents with Bypass cache (available on the free plan), or deploy the Cloudflare Worker, which runs ahead of the cache and sees everything.
Markdown twins are excluded from the cache automatically, so .md fetches are always counted. Click Run coverage check to measure the result. It fires two identical requests at your site and compares a per-request marker, so you get a real number for your setup rather than a warning.

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AI assistants getting 403

If ChatGPT or Claude report that they cannot read your pages, nothing on this list will help - the request is being refused before it reaches your site, and no plugin can count a request that never arrives. Open Bot Traffic in the SnowSEO dashboard. The panel at the top fetches your site with every published crawler user agent from outside your network, compares each against a browser, and names what refused it. See Troubleshooting for the full list of causes.

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Privacy

The plugin adds suggested wording to Settings → Privacy describing what tracking sends. Your site is the data controller here, so review it. If you would rather not send IP addresses, turn off Send IP addresses on the AI Crawlers screen. Crawlers can then no longer be verified - every hit will show as Unverified, spoof detection stops working, and coding agents cannot be attributed to a provider - but path, User-Agent and volume still report.

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Constants and filters

For agencies and config-managed fleets:
Full list in BEACON.md in the plugin.