In May we shipped two updates, 6.79 and 6.80. The main things in them are fixes for WordPress 7.0, better work with a few popular plugins, and a clearer way to control which bots can reach your site, including AI crawlers like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot.
Below is a short summary of what changed and why it matters.
WordPress 7.0 fixes
Support for WordPress 7.0 was already there, but after the release we found a few small issues and fixed them in this update.
One of them was a PHP 8 problem where the plugin could send duplicate HTTP headers before the response code. It did not break protection, but it could cause warnings on some servers. That is gone now. We also made a few other corrections in the code after the WordPress 7.0 update.
So if you are on WordPress 7.0, just update the plugin to get these fixes.
Better work with MailPoet and UserRegistration Pro
Two integrations got attention this month.
For MailPoet we fixed how the event token is passed when a form is submitted. Without the token the spam check on MailPoet forms was less accurate, now it works correctly.
For UserRegistration Pro we changed the cookie handling. Before, the plugin forced alternative cookies for these forms, which was not always needed and could cause issues. Now it does not force them, so registration works smoother.
If you use either of these plugins, just update and you get the fix, nothing to configure.
Controlling bot access with Anti-Crawler
This is the part we want to talk about a bit more, because the situation with bots has changed over the last year and the Anti-Crawler option now covers more than people think.
Not every bot is bad. The traffic that hits your site usually falls into three groups.
First, bots you want. Search engines like Googlebot and Bingbot index your pages and send you visitors. You don’t want to block these.
Second, bots you maybe want. AI crawlers like GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), Google-Extended (Gemini) and Copilot read your content to train their models and to answer user questions. Whether you want them depends on your site. Some owners are happy to appear in AI answers because it brings them attention and traffic. Others, especially sites with paid content, original research or their own data, prefer not to give it away. There is no single right answer here, it is your call.
Third, bots you don’t want at all. Vulnerability scanners looking for a way to hack the site, content and image scrapers, price parsers, and crawlers that hit your site so hard they slow it down or run up your hosting bill.
Anti-Crawler helps with all three groups.
When you turn it on, it blocks the aggressive and malicious traffic, the bots that scan for vulnerabilities, copy your content or prices, generate a lot of 404 errors while looking for hidden pages, or just crawl too hard and waste server resources.
Well-known good bots are allowed by default, so you don’t accidentally block the search engines and other traffic that actually helps you.
Deciding what AI does with your content
This is the new part. AI assistants crawl websites for two reasons, to train their models and to pull live information when someone asks them a question. For a blog or a news site that can be a good thing, your content shows up in AI answers and people find you. For a site that sells courses or publishes its own research, it can be the opposite.
Anti-Crawler lets you decide. You can block specific AI crawlers from the CleanTalk Dashboard in your Personal lists(SpamFireWall section) and keep the search engines allowed. If you block an AI crawler, that service stops accessing your content for training or for generating answers that reference your site. If you leave it allowed, nothing changes.
The point is that bot traffic today is not only about spam. It affects how fast your site runs, who copies your content, and whether your pages end up inside AI answers. Anti-Crawler puts all of that in one place, block the bad bots, keep the good ones, and choose for yourself how AI services use your site.
You can read more about how Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler work here: https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler
Other fixes
Both releases also include smaller improvements. We improved content sanitization in the Contacts Encoder shortcodes, refined how search forms are detected, and made a number of fixes for stability and the admin interface. The full list is in the changelog.
Update
Go to Plugins → Updates in your WordPress dashboard and update to 6.80. As always, if something does not work as expected, open a support ticket and we will look into it.
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