wpbot

[ryoko]

Have seen this a lot recently, on most of my sites.
Not been able to find out any information about it and certainly not filling in that form!

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; wpbot/1.3; +https://forms.gle/ajBaxygz9jSR8p8G9)
From 35.87.221.175

It DOES ask for robots.txt

[not2easy]

wpbot is a plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/chatbot/ that is used to enable forms for visitors of a site, but it is also a feature of ChatGPT and can work with it - or as a standalone part of a WP site, their description:

This ChatBot can be also be powered by OpenAI ChatGPT, DialogFlow, or simply use the built-in features to provide Live Support, Lead Generation and collect data without any extra cost. Own and Manage this Native WordPress ChatBot directly from your WordPress Dashboard for improving live customer support efficiency and user conversions.

It has no business being used as a UA and since the IP says Amazon Hosting, I'd block the effort with CIDR 35.80.0.0/12

[ryoko]

Thanks for the info not2easy.
However, none of my sites use (or have ever used) WordPress.
If it really is something to do with WordPress, I wonder why it crawls my sites so frequently?

It was blocked quite fast.

[not2easy]

It is a plugin that any WP site can use, how they use it is up to their intent. You don't need to be using WP to be on their list, they might just like your content.

[lucy24]

Unexpectedly, it appears to be robots.txt compliant. I find it every month or so requesting robots.txt; thanks to a combination of missing headers and/or unwelcome IP, it receives a minimalist robots.txt that Disallows everything. It then requests nothing else.

Can't hurt to try, anyway. I always say that the only thing better than a blocked request is a request that is never made in the first place.

[tangor]

Since I don't use WP---for YEARS I have denied "/wp" "wpbot" (URL and User Agent) as it does not apply. I want my 404s to actually mean something in my logs. The 403s also mean something, too.

YMMV

[lucy24]

<digression>
In some situations, I like returning a 404 because it gives no information to the visitor. A 403 says “I’m onto you”; a manual 404 also saves the server the trouble of looking for the (almost certainly nonexistent) file.
</digression>