robots.nxt

Hey everyone, I'm a cofounder of PaynPoint, codeveloper of robots.nxt. Commercial websites live and die by audience analytics and conversion to revenue. Bots are the largest audience for most websites, but there aren't good tools for managing bots. Most analytics ignore bots, since there's no monetization for them. Some report bots with limited insight and low resolution. That's why my cofounder Wes and I built robots.nxt. With robots.nxt, you can slash your site operations costs while improving security and converting untapped traffic into revenues. This is more than just "bot blocking", it's active, fine grained bot management and conversion. And you can block bots. robots.nxt provides a free bot traffic analytics dashboard to see how many bots you're getting, what bots they are, what they're costing you, and what content they're crawling. We provide rules for specific bots, bot categories, and specific content or content categories, and more. You can modify and combine these, such as rate limiting or access denial to selected areas, and add a pricing model any combination of rules or identities. For example, if ChatGPT tries to crawl your content pages, you can set robots.nxt so that your server will charge the bot $0.25 per page, but if an indexer crawls your pages there's no charge. And if a bad bot shows up, you can serve it a 404 or dead, link-less homepage so that the bot thinks there's just nothing there. If a bot pays for your content, you can include an AI training license. You can dynamically render robots.txt, explaining what they're allowed to do, while ensuring they can't do anything you don't want. An iron fist in a velvet glove. You can manage your server responses to, for example, filter any form submission element from any pages served to a bot. You don't have to challenge, because the form never gets served to a bot in the first place. We can see any attempts to request insecure files or site areas, so you can see if someone is trying an exploit. Humans will never be the largest source of web traffic ever again. The tools we've built with robots.nxt are an emerging standard for website and web app management in this new bot-dominated internet. Today we're launching our analytics and rules engine, all free for now. Analytics will stay free for the time being, but the command-and-control features will have a subscription attached to them soon. After a shakedown period we'll turn on the payment funnels so you can start driving new revenues from bots, too. "But bots don't engage in transactions!" Some of them do already, for example with concert tickets, sneakers, GPU sales, and collectibles, with more bots having transaction capabilities every day. Several startups are building crypto wallets for AI bots, and now we're delivering the site management tools to enable you to accept those payments. Lots of AI companies pay "manually" too, through human-negotiated content licensing that robots.nxt can automate and scale. We'd love your feedback and criticism so we can stress test our platform, catch-and-kill any bugs you find, and validate our analytics and control systems against more live sites and live traffic. Setup only takes about 5 minutes and you'll start getting results immediately. Please give us a try and tell us what you think!