How to Set Up AI Crawler Logging on WordPress Without a Developer

Key takeaways AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so Google Analytics and most WordPress analytics plugins are structurally blind to them. You need server-side logging. Three free no-code options cover most needs: LLM Bot Tracker (site-wide logging), the AI Discovery Files plugin (discovery-file logging plus llms.txt generation), and AuditAE (lightweight rolling log). Run a crawler checker before you start logging, because your host or CDN may already be blocking bots, and your logs will just show silence. A fetch is not a citation. Logs prove bots can reach your content; to know whether AI answers actually cite you, you need a visibility platform like Promptwatch. ## Why you can't see AI bots in Google Analytics This is the part that surprises people. Google Analytics, Fathom, Plausible, Matomo, and every other JavaScript-based analytics tool record visits by executing a script in the visitor's browser. AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot don't execute JavaScript. They fetch raw HTML and leave. So your AI traffic is invisible by design, not because something is broken. The raw server access logs technically contain the answer, but on shared hosting they rotate every few days, arrive gzipped, or aren't exposed at all. Asking a small business owner to grep an access log is not a plan. That's the gap the plugins below fill: they intercept requests server-side, inside WordPress, and log the ones that come from known AI bots. ## What the logs actually show, from a real site Before setup instructions, here's what a month of real data looks like. The team at AI Visibility instrumented mcneece.com, a one-person web design business in Northamptonshire, and published 30 days of crawler logs (to August 4, 2026): 55 file reads by 9 unique AI bots, with nothing blocked by robots.txt. PerplexityBot led with 11 reads, followed by Applebot with 10. A few things in that data are worth internalizing before you set up your own logging: Apple was the second most active reader of a tiny UK business site. Applebot gets almost no attention in AI visibility conversations, which are dominated by ChatGPT and Claude, yet it's one of the most diligent crawlers out there. The same site logged 43 reads from 11 bots in the 30 days to July 15. Three weeks later, volume was up 28%, the roster of bots had narrowed, and the leader had changed from OAI-SearchBot to PerplexityBot. One-off checks miss all of this. Training crawlers and live crawlers from the same company behave completely differently. ClaudeBot (Anthropic's bulk training crawler) hit the site once in a month. Claude-User (which fetches pages when a person asks Claude something live) hit it 7 times. If your plugin lumps them together as