Tips Tuesday – Block AI Bots, Whitelist Your IP, AI in Plugins and Themes

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips this week include:

• Tips Tuesday Plus subscriptions are available
• AI powered plugins and themes are here
• Kadence is going all in on AI
• We’re not early to AI anymore
• Why isn’t anyone paying attention to AI security?
• Developers will soon become whole-site AI agent builders
• The new snake oil salesman are coming – what to watch out for
• WP 6.4 Beta 1 is out
• Where the exclusive WP updates are moving to
• Plugin devs still upset with WP.com
• How to find and whitelist your IP address in Cloudflare – updated tutorial
• Is your search traffic up or down lately? See where not to check for problems
• Bing’s bad choice to block its bot
• Bing acts like Google doesn’t exist
• Should you block the Bard bot?
• What you should be blocking instead of AI bots
• It’s too easy for bots to break through paywalls now
• Live session with DIY SEO course members this week
• New AI-powered SEO agency bot that we will be blocking and why

This post may contain affiliate links. Thank you for using them to support the free and helpful info you get in Tips Tuesday.

Summer break is definitely over and things are ramping up again in the site owner world – everywhere. So, this is a really long post today, but every bit is worth reading.

(See what happens when we have a week or two of nothing much to report? They save it up for us, I think.)

Tips Tuesday Plus

Thank you to everyone who replied to the survey I sent on Friday about the changes coming to Tips Tuesday. Your feedback has been invaluable.

And thank you to all of my Hub clients for your feedback on what you enjoy most about Tips Tuesday too. It was very insightful and helpful to me in making the decision for this change.

This will be the last full Tips Tuesday.

I’ll still be reporting the news you need to know, but the deeper info is moving to a paid subscription called Tips Tuesday Plus.

And it will be a combo of some of the news I report in the AI Discover Hub as well, but with the focus slanted toward what affects WordPress site owners.

The fact is, whether you have any interest in AI or not, it will impact you, as it is coming into your site and you may not even be aware of it.

That’s why we all need this extra info.

For a mere $24 you get 6 months of:

• High signal, low noise takes on the most important news that affects you as a site owner.
• Deep testing results and reviews on AI tools that are being incorporated into WordPress themes and plugins right now.
• Testing results and reviews on AI add-ons and browser extensions for admin software like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
• Live sessions for updates on the news and Ask Me Anything facetime.
• The satisfaction of supporting expert, independent reporting that you can trust, with a dedicated focus on news you actually need, not hype and fluff.

(NOTE: That’s not $24 per month. It’s $24 for the entire 6 month’s worth of posts and livestreams. That’s less than $1 per post and the lives are a big, free bonus.)

And next week TT+ subscribers will get the first edition, and the whole post will be delivered via email, not just the extra snippets. One place, one read, no login required.

Throughout this post you’ll see sections labeled with the type of info that will only be included in the Tips Tuesday Plus version.

The AI in WordPress Summit Was Eye-Opening

AI is developing faster than any of us realized. Even the folks like me who follow AI news are stunned by the rapid pace of improvement.

And now with access to open-source AI models, developers have wasted no time in building AI powered solutions for WordPress and those who work in that industry.

AI Powered Plugins and Themes Are Here

I watched several of the sessions live.

Two of them really blew my hair back.

The sheer number of plugins with AI incorporated into them is stunning.

Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress.

And AI in them extends the functionality of the plugin itself.

I have profound concerns about security, privacy, bloat, and host server resource use with many of these AI-powered site plugins and themes, especially those that require an API to a 3rd party.

And the session on a popular theme and how they are incorporating AI for onboarding and new site builds is, well, the word overwhelming may not be strong enough.

That session was just a glimps of where themes are headed, and it concerns me more than it thrills me.

Most of these AI-powered tools are not ready for prime time, but that has not kept developers from releasing them.

That is exactly why I have to start a schedule of testing on what to use and what to wait on, and the risks involved if you do use them.

I need to finish watching the rest of the sessions and gather my notes and thoughts because I need the wholistic view from the wide array of speakers that presented, and I need to make a plan to prioritize the testing time.

But I can tell you about 2 of the sessions that had my full attention, and should have yours too.

JetPack Brings AI Generated Content to WordPress

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Little ole Jetpack, the plugin we love to hate on, is one of the first truly viable AI content generator plugins for WordPress.

It’s like having ChatGPT right in the editor to help you:

• create blog post titles
• do research
• create an outline
• Create images

And because it is Jetpack, which is owned and developed by Automattic, it hooks right into WP natively.

All of the output is in appropriate blocks.

You just do some editorial tweaking and viola, you have a post.

Is this something you want to use?

Hell no!

This will be the first plugin at the top of my test list for checking into the API and host resource usage, plus how the API reacts to the type of super site security I set up for site audit clients..

And because of its native WP integration, JetPack will serve as my benchmark for all other similar plugins too.

That’s a sad thing to say, isn’t it? 

Recently, Dustin Hyle of Iridium Hosting let me know that even with every feature turned off, JetPack causes database slowdowns.

Kadence is Going All in on AI

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

There was a session on Elementor and how they are using AI. Nope. It breaks too much already. And this is not going to make that any better.

But the session that stunned me most was the Kadence AI demo.

Do you remember the first time you searched for your site’s theme?

Do you remember getting dazzled then dazed with all of the choices to the point you didn’t even remember what you were looking for?

That’s the same type of overwhelm of choice that Kadence will be bringing to their new Advanced Block.

I always wondered why more designers didn’t jump all over Patterns when they first came to WordPress a couple, or more, years ago.

And now we have Patterns on steroids with the layout choices Kadence is going to make available.

Choice is great. Too many choices makes me feel like I’m standing in the pain reliever isle at the pharmacy, with 200 boxes of different kinds of aspirin. If I didn’t have a headache before I went in, I certainly do now.

I’m also concerned about theme bloat.

I’m not so concerned about speed, as all of the layouts are in Gutenberg blocks.

But, I am concerned about the API connection and credits required to access who knows what AI model so that you can just conversationally type in a bit of info about your business and it spits out the appropriate content.

If all of this wasn’t enough, at the end of the presentation they said they want to totally revamp their Starter Templates to bring AI to every aspect of them.

Dear God!

Can’t we have a simple, clean, secure theme where we can change some colors, grab some fonts, upload our logo or banner and that be it?

I hope they leave us at least a few of those.

They also announced that the new Advanced Block will be released in Kadence Blocks Pro in October.

All I can ask is that if you have that plugin, that you don’t make use of that new Advanced Block yet.

Not kidding. 

Don’t invoke it until me and my webmasters finish the testing on it.

And I can tell you that the testing has not been easy due to the fact that Kadence has not given good documentation to the beta testers and has not given them a group to talk amongst themselves to report common issues and help each other find solutions.

I don’t believe they are thinking this through.

And we need time to check the security concerns of what this new block brings, whether you use it or not.

We’re Not Early on AI Anymore

You may have heard folks, including me, say that we are early to the AI game.

Not any more.

You WILL be impacted by it, even if you never use it.

The API connections may be made during a plugin update – and you will never even know that your site is at risk.

This is exactly why I HAVE to start the deep testing right now.

And it’s exactly why you will want that deeper info so you can keep your site safe and fast.

Nobody is Looking at Security

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Not to mention that script kiddies everywhere are using ChatGPT to write code now.

In one of the AI summit sessions, the dev mentioned why they did not use ChatGPT to write code and used a better AI tool to search for code snippets that are already out there.

ChatGPT hallucinates – all the time.

And even when you can get an AI tool to generate or show you code, it still takes an experienced coder to verify it and properly incorporate it so that it is fast and secure.

There was another session where a “dev” built a complex membership site and relied heavily on ChatGPT for the extra coding. It was a joke.

And you won’t be able to tell the difference in which plugins and themes have crap code and which don’t anymore.

This is exactly why I have to do deep tests, and why you will need those results.

We’ll have to know which plugins have AI elements and whether it is safe to use them or not.

And, you’ll need an advocate to bring these issues to the attention of the plugin devs for you too.

Devs Will Become Whole-Site AI Agent Builders

The sites that AI models can build now are laughable.

It won’t stay that way.

The role of developers is changing rapidly because of it.

If they don’t keep on top of what AI can do, all but enterprise-level devs will be out of a job.

A year from now will be too late to play catch up – not kidding.

Every site platform is adopting AI.

There will be nowhere for us to run a site that doesn’t have some AI component at its core.

And the code running everything will be prone to breaks and hacks – at a scale we have never seen before.

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is THE visionary developer and teacher that I follow everywhere like a puppy.

He sees the writing on the wall with this too and is doing all he can to guide developers into this new AI-infused coding world. Their expertise is very much still needed – just at a different level.

I’m afraid not enough devs will listen to him.

I’m even more afraid that he will be drowned out by the script kiddies who see AI as their shortcut and sell us shiny new things that will break and be hacked and cause all manner of mayhem when the underlying code continues to evolve and these newbie coders don’t keep up with it because they don’t know to do that, and they don’t know how.

READ: AI is a Loom: The End and the New Beginning of Web Dev

SEE IT: If you’re on TikTok, see and hear Morten’s summary

Get Ready – New Snake Oil Salesmen Are Coming

I bet many of you started out with a course from someone who made all this blogging stuff sound super easy and super profitable.

And they told you to use Bluehost and Divi or Elementor.

Later, if you made a real go of it and survived, you found out that none of that was true.

And you paid a much higher price to come out of what they told you to use than you would have if you had known to find someone like me at the get go.

Similarly I’m seeing one young man after another flex on TikTok about the 6-figure incomes they are making by advising corporations on how to get AI to do the work so they don’t need so many employees to do it.

Yeah, they don’t know code or security and that’s going to bite them in the butt someday.

The same thing is already happening with a whole new group of influencers telling you how you can use free AI tools to make millions the easy way.

When it comes to websites, they have no idea what they are talking about. 

Y’all would laugh if you looked at their sites – if they even have one. They are simple HTML things from 2009.

Just be careful about that “it’s so easy” pitch. 

Yeah, easy in, hard to come out of and do right.

Let’s avoid that with all these new AI-powered themes and plugins, shall we?

Did I Make the Case for Tips Tuesday Plus?

I hope by now it’s clear why AI integration testing is required to ensure we keep our sites safe and fast.

I also hope it’s clear how much extra time it will take to keep up with the changes at this level and to do the extra testing.

And I hope that you will you choose to benefit from all the effort and support it by subscribing to Tips Tuesday Plus.

Subscribe Now https://learn.blogaid.net/get-tips-tuesday-plus/

WordPress Tips

WordPress 6.4 Beta 1 Released

I expect that Beta 2 will be released today.

While there still will be Gutenberg-related changes, the focus of WP development is now switching to make it easier for teams to work on a single website.

The final release is in December, so I won’t start my testing until sometime in November when RC2 (the second Release Candidate) rolls out.

Exclusive WP Update Instructions Moving to Hub and Webmaster Members

I will be making a “What’s New in WP 6.4” video tour available to the public, as usual.

But y’all know we are never the first to update to a major release.

I always send out the special update instructions when I feel it is safe for us to do that update.

But, those instructions will now be sent only to my Hub site audit clients and to my Webmaster Training members.

After this last 6.3 update, that also coincided with a PHP change, and all the extra support required, I think it’s best to send these instructions to folks who I know have clean setups and proper security measures in place, and who are on super hosts that know how to set up a server.

Plugin Tips

Plugin Devs Still Upset with WP.com Listings

Remember that hoohaa I mentioned a few Tips Tuesdays ago where plugin devs were up in arms about how the free version of their plugins were listed for WordPress.com site owners?

Well, Automattic did take one step toward them by putting a link on the listing to the download of the plugin from the WP.org Plugin repository.

It’s not enough.

Plugin devs are still upset.

This is just another example of how this long-running, “everything needs to be for free” expectation and freemium model in WP is breaking down.

Seasoned devs are not going to make free plugins with no hope of enticing site owners to upgrade to a paid version.

They need that money to offset the insane overhead of offering free support, especially when most of the issues are not due to their plugin, but due to other conflicts on the site, or novice site owner issues.

Security Tips

How to Find and Whitelist Your IP Address in Cloudflare – Updated

The Cloudflare interface and process has changed with regard to whitelisting your IP there.

It was always important to do, but now it is required due to new restrictions on the OWASP security settings that kick the most bad bots out before they have a chance to hit our hosting much less our sites.

Site audit client Hub members also received additional tutorials and support on how to safely acquire a dedicated VPN to combat frequent IP rotation on the wifi part of their router or if they travel a lot.

That way they can whitelist one IP and be done with it.

SEO Tips

Is Your Search Traffic Up or Down Lately?

The big Google Helpful Content Update has just now finished rolling out.

There was a big surge of fluctuation right at the end too.

When traffic fluctuates, look at your traffic sources first, not to your site itself for the problem. Monitoring ranking fluctuations is key, like the SEO pros in the above article have done with regard to the latest Google update..

The issue is very rarely to never a problem with the site.

Check for errors in Google Search Console first to confirm that.

And stop running speed tests and other useless tasks that give you no real info about the problem.

Once you get a site audit, and everything has been brought up to par, relax in knowing that your site is not the issue. 

The problem is elsewhere. 

And it’s very likely to be a change with the traffic originator, like Google Search.

FYI, if you’re not looking at your Google Search Console analytics at least weekly, you will have no way to determine if the fluctuations you are seeing are new or not. 

And if you don’t keep track of them across the year, you won’t know that much of the swings are seasonal too, or are news related.

You can’t just jump in there when you notice a revenue drop, or a traffic drop, and hope to make sense of what you’re seeing with no context.

That’s my guess as to why folks try to poke on their site to find the problem. They just don’t want to deal with any kind of analytics.

But the analytics is where your answers are.

Bing’s Bad Choice To Block Its Bot

Well, this is unfortunate.

Bing already gave us a good way to block their OpenAI bot from crawling our sites via our robots.txt file.

But now they have decided not to wait for that to go fully into effect and chose to use another method that is already in existence. 

They will be using the noarchive tag.

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Who is going to go through each piece of content on their site to add that tag to only the ones it doesn’t want AI bots to access?

And all it does is tell bots to remove the cached version.

Plus, it’s a misuse of this tag.

You only want to use it for things that you don’t want search engines to crawl or index, like thin content pages such as the Thank You page you send folks to when they submit your contact form. Or for time-sensitive landing pages or upsell pages or such that should never appear in search.

Bing Acts Like Google Doesn’t Exist

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Bing wants us to use IndexNow to ping it every time we have a new post/page.

Google does not want that – it doesn’t even want us to submit it via Search Console. It wants to rely on our XML sitemap and its own crawl budget that it has assigned to your site.

And now Bing wants to misuse an existing tag that Google will be crawling too, and not interpreting it the way Bing does.

Every site owner I know does everything they can to make Google happy first. If what they do makes other search engines happy, that’s icing on the cake.

But I don’t know anybody who will be doing this noarchive tag change this way – unless they know nothing about SEO or don’t care about traffic from Google Search.

And I told my Hub clients and DIY SEO members why they don’t want to block the GPTbot either.

In short, don’t follow Bing’s advice if you have any desire to please Google

Block Bard Via Robots.txt

Google began having conversations back in July to figure out the best way for site owners to block their content from being used to train Google’s own AI.

They came up with a new Google-Extended disallow directive for robots.txt.

This is similar to the GBTbot directive from OpenAI.

(The following info in this section is the type that will only be in Tips Tuesday Plus next time.)

Here’s my take on it.

It won’t work.

We need a wholistic standard for all AI bots that is implemented as a meta-tag.

What OpenAI and Bard bots don’t scrape from your site, other AI bots will.

And then that content will become available in their AI model.

And then somebody, somewhere is going to use it in their published content.

You get no credit as the source.

What You Should Be Blocking

Honestly, for most bloggers, I think you are cutting off your nose to spite your face with blocking Google or OpenAI bots and acting like they are the only bots scraping and misusing your content.

Scraping has been going on for 20 years.

One of the speed and security measures I add for my site audit clients is a condition that blocks the over 20 SEO agency bots, that are chewing up our hosting resources which should be reserved for our human visitors, and then giving that info to their paying clients, who are our competition, so they can beat us out for higher ranking.

THAT’S what you should be a whale of a lot more concerned about than AI bots.

Some Paywalls are Better Than Others

Some site owners think a paywall is going to help – like the kind used by The New York Times and such? 

Nope.

There are at least 2 dozen, easily available browser extensions that can run end around a paywall.

That’s exactly why Tips Tuesday Plus is going to a membership subscription. The extended info is simply not on the same page and only protected by some week JavaScript pop up.

It’s behind an actual paywall membership, just like my other courses are.

Live DIY SEO Session This Week

Bot blocking is a complex topic, and there is no single answer for every type of site.

The best you can do is to get educated and make an informed decision that includes your ability to prove that it is your published content being plagiarized elsewhere, and your ability to be properly credited in AI-powered searches – that are being used more and more by younger folks who will eventually get their parents to use it too.

I’ll be meeting live with my DIY SEO course members this week to discuss how these AI bot and other changes will affect them so that they can make an informed decision for their site and content needs.

There is no one-size-fits-all remedy for these things.

New AI-Powered SEO Agency Bot – Will Be Blocked

One of the things I check during site audits is the list of bots that are hitting the site.

And I block the SEO agency bots – here’s why.

They are scraping your content and feeding the data from it to their paying customers to tell them how to beat you at ranking in your niche.

And they are chewing up your hosting resources to do it.

Oh hell no!!!!!

We block that stuff at Cloudflare before it ever has the chance to hit our hosting, much less our site.

I have a list of 20+ such bots – by name – and I’ll be adding another one to it very soon, as it is taking off like gangbusters now.

I guess the company got some extra money to do more crawling, or the fact that they use AI to power their data crunching has taken the load off their servers and freed it up to crawl more.

Either way, we’re going to kick them.

I’ll have the new list out to my site audit clients and Webmaster Training members as soon as I can.