External scan versus installed traffic monitor
BotSieve and AI Crawl Score both help site owners understand AI crawler activity, but they work from opposite ends: BotSieve classifies real incoming requests from inside a WordPress install, while AI Crawl Score sends a bounded external fetch and reports what it receives back.
What BotSieve does
BotSieve is distributed as a free WordPress plugin, described on its WordPress.org listing as analyzing incoming requests locally and classifying traffic into categories such as real visitors, AI crawlers, SEO crawlers, known bots, and suspicious requests, displayed in a dashboard inside WordPress. It detects named AI crawlers including OpenAI’s GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot, Meta AI, Google AI, Perplexity, Amazonbot, and Applebot, among others. Because it runs inside WordPress itself, it only works on WordPress sites and only sees traffic that actually reaches that WordPress install.
What AI Crawl Score does
AI Crawl Score’s free readiness checker requires no plugin or installation. It performs an external raw-fetch scan of up to five pages on any publicly reachable site, CMS-agnostic, reporting robots.txt directives by crawler identity, sitemap presence, JSON-LD structured data, and delivered-content accuracy. It never sees a site’s actual incoming request logs; it only observes what its own bounded fetch receives at scan time.
Side by side
| Question | AI Crawl Score | BotSieve |
|---|---|---|
| Platform requirement | None, any public site | WordPress only |
| Data source | External raw fetch at scan time | Live server-side request classification |
| Historical traffic view | No | Yes, within the WordPress dashboard |
| Installation required | No | Yes, a WordPress plugin |
| Robots/sitemap/schema check | Yes | Not its stated focus |
| Cost | Free | Free |
Which one fits your situation
If a site is not built on WordPress, or the question is a one-off technical check without installing anything, AI Crawl Score’s external scan is the simpler fit. If the site runs WordPress and the goal is an ongoing, installed view of which named AI crawlers are actually hitting it and how traffic breaks down between real visitors and bots, BotSieve’s locally run classification answers a question an external scanner structurally cannot: it sees real historical requests, not a single bounded fetch. Google’s AI-optimization guidance does not require either tool specifically; both are optional diagnostics toward the same broader goal of understanding crawler access.
See verify ai crawler traffic, ai bot log analysis setup, and ai crawler log analysis.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI Crawl Score tell me if GPTBot actually visited my site historically?
No. It only reports what its own external fetch receives at scan time; it has no access to a site incoming request logs the way an installed plugin like BotSieve does.
Does BotSieve work on non-WordPress sites?
No, it is a WordPress plugin and requires a WordPress installation to run.