How is this different from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics shows you traffic. Shadow shows you traffic, AI bot activity, what AI platforms say about your brand, AND tells you what to do about all of it. It's analytics + AI intelligence + action steps in one tool.

Do I need to install anything?

For basic monitoring (bot detection, AI perception, readiness score) — nope, just enter your URL. For full visitor analytics (clicks, behavior, sessions), add one script tag. One-click integrations for Vercel, Shopify, WordPress, and more.

Will it slow down my site?

No. The script is under 5KB and loads async. Zero impact on page speed or Core Web Vitals. External monitoring has literally no impact — it watches from the outside.

What AI bots does Shadow detect?

All of them. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider, Amazonbot, and dozens more. The Shadow Network means new bots get identified across all users instantly.

What do you mean by "actionable steps"?

Shadow doesn't just show you graphs. It says things like: "ChatGPT has your pricing wrong — add structured data to /pricing to fix it" or "Your bounce rate on /features is 68% — here's why and what to change." Specific, do-it-today recommendations.

Can Shadow block bots?

Shadow is a telescope, not a shield. It shows you who's visiting and what AI says about you. It generates block rules and robots.txt configs you can apply — but it doesn't intercept traffic.

Yes. Shadow never collects PII. IP addresses are hashed after classification. No cookies on your visitors. All Shadow Network data is anonymized. GDPR compliant by design.

How do I block NewsPlease?

Add this to your robots.txt file: User-agent: NewsPlease / Disallow: /

Does NewsPlease respect robots.txt?

Yes, NewsPlease by Community / Various respects robots.txt directives.

AI Training Respects robots.txt

NewsPlease

by Community / Various First seen: 2017-01

About

news-please is an open-source news crawler used to build journalism and media datasets for NLP and LLM training. Used extensively in academic research and commercial AI projects to collect article text from news sites.

Purpose

News and media dataset collection for NLP/LLM training

User Agent String

news-please/1.5

How to Control in robots.txt

🚫 Block NewsPlease

User-agent: NewsPlease
Disallow: /

✅ Allow NewsPlease

User-agent: NewsPlease
Allow: /

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