Honeypot Traps

This is a Pro feature. It is on by default.

Enable or disable under Settings → ScraperBlock → Advanced → Honeypot Traps.

How It Works

ScraperBlock Pro adds a hidden link to the footer of every page for visitors who aren't logged in. The link points to your home page with the aibs_trap query parameter, for example https://yoursite.com/?aibs_trap=1.
People never see or click it - it's positioned off-screen, hidden from screen readers and skipped by keyboard navigation.
The link is marked rel="nofollow", and a Disallow: /*aibs_trap rule is added to the User-agent: * group of your robots.txt, so Google, Bing and other well-behaved crawlers stay away from it.
A scraper that follows it anyway gets 403 Forbidden, and its IP address is blocked for one hour - every request from that IP is refused with the reason honeypot_trap.

Logged-in users are never trapped, and IPs on the allowlist are never checked.

If your site serves a physical robots.txt file, WordPress doesn't generate one and the Disallow rule can't be added. Add Disallow: /*aibs_trap under User-agent: * in that file yourself.

⚠️

Several visitors can share one IP address (offices, mobile networks). The one-hour block only starts after something on that IP follows a link no person can see, so this is rare - but if a real visitor reports being blocked, check the Logs tab for honeypot_trap and add their IP to the allowlist.

Behavioral Detection Content Poisoning