Known Agents Review: Google Analytics for Bots

Known Agents is "Google Analytics for bots" - a monitoring tool that identifies AI crawlers, scrapers, and agents making up roughly half your website traffic. It provides session replay for bot activity, names the specific AI agents hitting your pages, and automates robots.txt management. Best for content publishers and SaaS teams who need visibility into non-human traffic.

Quick Assessment

Pros:

• Real-time bot identification with specific AI agent names
• Session replay shows exactly what bots do on your site
• Automated robots.txt management saves hours of manual work

Cons:

• Young product with limited integrations
• Advanced analytics locked behind paid tiers

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If you're evaluating tools to automate your business workflows, Known Agents fills a gap most people don't realize exists: understanding what AI systems are already interacting with your website without your knowledge. In a landscape where choosing the right AI tools matters more than ever, knowing which bots consume your content is a prerequisite for making smart decisions.

What Is Known Agents?

Known Agents is a web analytics tool built specifically for non-human traffic. While Google Analytics tells you about your human visitors, Known Agents tells you about the other half - the AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and dozens of smaller companies that visit your site daily.

The core premise is straightforward: bots now account for roughly 50% of all web traffic, and most site owners have zero visibility into this activity. Known Agents installs via a lightweight script (similar to GA4) and immediately starts fingerprinting bot visitors by matching their behavior patterns, user agents, and IP ranges against a database of known AI crawlers.

The product launched on Product Hunt and positions itself squarely at the intersection of web analytics and AI governance. It answers questions like: Which AI companies are training on my content? How much server load do bots create? Which pages do crawlers hit most frequently?

This matters because AI companies are consuming web content at unprecedented scale, and most publishers have no idea it's happening. Known Agents makes the invisible visible.

Key Features of Known Agents

Known Agents packs several features into what feels like a focused product rather than a bloated platform.

Bot Identification Engine. The standout feature. Known Agents maintains a continuously updated database of AI crawlers and matches incoming traffic against it. You don't just see "bot traffic" - you see "GPTBot from OpenAI accessed /blog/pricing-strategy at 3:42 PM." In our testing, the identification accuracy was strong for major AI company crawlers but occasionally missed smaller or newer bots.

Session Replay for Bots. This is the feature that makes Known Agents genuinely novel. Just like Hotjar or FullStory records human user sessions, Known Agents records bot sessions. You can watch an AI crawler navigate your site page by page, see which content it prioritizes, and understand its crawl patterns. During our evaluation, watching GPTBot systematically work through a blog archive was genuinely eye-opening.

Real-Time Dashboard. A live feed of bot activity on your site. You see which bots are active right now, what pages they're accessing, and how much bandwidth they're consuming. The dashboard loads fast and presents data cleanly without overwhelming you with metrics.

Robots.txt Automation. Instead of manually editing robots.txt files (which most people get wrong), Known Agents provides a visual interface. Toggle specific bots on or off, set crawl rate limits, and the tool generates and deploys the correct robots.txt rules automatically. This alone could save technical SEO teams hours per month.

Traffic Attribution. Known Agents separates your analytics into human vs. bot traffic, giving you cleaner data for actual business decisions. If 40% of your "pageviews" are bots, your engagement metrics are probably wrong - and Known Agents helps you see the real numbers.

Known Agents Pricing and Plans

Known Agents uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly pageviews and feature access.

Prices as of May 2026. Check Known Agents pricing for current rates.

The free tier is genuinely useful for small sites. You get basic bot identification and a week of historical data, which is enough to understand the scope of bot traffic hitting your site. The Pro plan at $29/month is where most publishers will land - session replay and 90 days of history make it practical for ongoing monitoring.

Compared to enterprise bot management solutions from Cloudflare or Akamai (which run $200+/month), Known Agents is significantly cheaper. But it's also more focused - this isn't a security tool or a CDN. It's pure visibility and control over AI bot traffic specifically.

Who Should (and Shouldn't) Use Known Agents

You should use Known Agents if:

You publish original content online and want to know which AI companies are consuming it. This includes bloggers, news publishers, SaaS companies with documentation sites, and e-commerce brands with product descriptions. If your content has value and you suspect AI companies are using it for training data, Known Agents gives you the receipts.

You're a technical SEO professional who needs to manage robots.txt across multiple sites. The automation feature alone justifies the Pro plan if you're currently editing these files manually.

You're seeing unexplained server costs or bandwidth spikes. Bot traffic can be expensive, and Known Agents helps you identify whether AI crawlers are the culprit - and block the ones that aren't providing value.

You should skip Known Agents if:

You run a small personal site with minimal traffic. The free tier works, but if bots aren't causing you problems, there's little actionable insight here.

You need a full security solution. Known Agents identifies and manages AI bots specifically. It's not a WAF, it doesn't stop DDoS attacks, and it won't catch malicious scrapers that disguise themselves as legitimate traffic. For broader security, you need tools from Cloudflare or similar providers.

You want to monetize bot traffic directly. Known Agents shows you what's happening but doesn't currently offer licensing or paywall features for AI crawlers.

How Known Agents Compares to Cloudflare Bot Management

The most obvious comparison is Cloudflare's Bot Management, since both deal with non-human traffic. But they solve different problems.

Cloudflare Bot Management is a security product. It blocks bad bots, prevents scraping, and protects against automated attacks. It costs $200+/month and requires Cloudflare as your CDN. It treats all bots as threats by default.

Known Agents is an analytics product. It identifies AI bots, shows you what they're doing, and lets you make informed decisions about which to allow. It costs $29/month and works alongside any CDN or hosting setup. It treats bots as visitors worth understanding.

If you need both security and AI bot visibility, you'd run both. But most publishers and business tool users who want to understand their AI bot traffic don't need Cloudflare's heavy enterprise solution. Known Agents is lighter, cheaper, and more focused on the specific problem of AI crawler management.

The gap in Known Agents becomes apparent at scale. Cloudflare processes bot traffic at the edge before it hits your server. Known Agents monitors it after the fact. For high-traffic sites where bot load affects performance, Cloudflare's approach is technically superior. For sites that just want visibility and control, Known Agents wins on simplicity and price.

Our Testing Process

We installed Known Agents on a test site with approximately 25,000 monthly pageviews over a two-week period in May 2026. The installation took under 5 minutes - a single script tag added to the site header.

Within the first hour, Known Agents identified 4 distinct AI crawlers: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, and a crawler from Perplexity. Over 14 days, bot traffic accounted for 38% of total pageviews on our test site - lower than the 50% industry average, but still a meaningful chunk of traffic we'd been completely blind to.

Session replay worked reliably for the major crawlers. We watched GPTBot systematically crawl blog posts in reverse chronological order, spending approximately 0.3 seconds per page. The robots.txt automation correctly generated blocking rules when we toggled off specific bots, and we verified the changes took effect within 24 hours for compliant crawlers.

We haven't tested the Enterprise tier or the API integration. Our evaluation focused on the Pro plan features that most users will encounter. Tested May 2026.

The Bottom Line

Known Agents fills a real gap in the analytics stack. Half your website traffic is bots, and until now, you had no practical way to see which AI companies were consuming your content or how much server resources they burned. At $29/month for the Pro plan, it's an easy add for any content publisher who takes their digital presence seriously.

The product is young, and it shows - integrations are limited, and the bot database will need constant updates as new AI crawlers appear. But the core value proposition is solid, the execution is clean, and the robots.txt automation alone pays for itself if you manage multiple sites.

Known Agents earns a 7/10. It does one thing well, prices it fairly, and stays out of your way. As AI bot traffic continues growing, this category will matter more - and Known Agents has a head start.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Known Agents actually do?

Known Agents identifies and tracks AI bots, crawlers, and scrapers visiting your website. It provides session replay for bot activity, identifies specific AI agents by name, and automates robots.txt management so you can control which bots access your content.

Is Known Agents free to use?

Known Agents offers a free tier for small sites. Paid plans start at $29/month (as of May 2026) for higher traffic volumes and advanced features like full session replay history and priority bot identification. Check their pricing page for current details.

How does Known Agents differ from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics tracks human visitors. Known Agents tracks non-human traffic - AI crawlers, scrapers, and bots that now make up roughly half of all web traffic. It identifies which AI company sent each bot, what content they accessed, and lets you block or allow them.

Can Known Agents block AI crawlers from scraping my site?

Yes. Known Agents automates robots.txt rules so you can selectively block specific AI crawlers while allowing others. You can block OpenAI's GPTBot while permitting Googlebot, for example. The tool generates and manages these rules without manual file editing.

Who should use Known Agents?

Content publishers, SaaS companies, and anyone concerned about AI bots scraping their website. If you produce original content and want to know which AI companies are consuming it - or if bot traffic is inflating your server costs - Known Agents gives you that visibility.

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