Known Agents review 2026: bot analytics that can act on access, not on answers
Known Agents, formerly Dark Visitors, logs AI bots and AI referrals with a free 100K-event plan and auto-updates your robots.txt. It never asks ChatGPT anything. Who that suits.
Most tools we review act on content, or don't act at all. Known Agents acts on access. It can rewrite your robots.txt as new AI agents appear, block bad bots at the plugin or edge, and verify that a visitor claiming to be a crawler really is one. That's genuine execution, which is rare in this category. It just happens on the opposite side of the problem from prompt tracking, because Known Agents never asks an AI engine what it says about you.
What it is and who it's for
Known Agents is the company formerly called Dark Visitors. Its about page says it started in 2023 as a side project listing the eight AI bots known at the time and was renamed to reflect a broader product. It was founded in New York by Gavin King and says more than 5,000 websites use it. It also runs a public Agent Directory of more than 2,000 bots, which is useful even if you never sign up.
There are four products:
- Agent Analytics: which crawlers, scrapers and AI agents hit which pages, with spike alerts, error and redirect analysis, robots.txt violations and spoof checks
- AI Chat Referral Tracking: human visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and others, by page, country and time
- Automatic Robots.txt, which adds rules for the bot categories you choose as new agents show up
- an Agent Identification API with IP or HTTP message signature verification where supported
Data arrives server side, not from a browser script, through WordPress, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud, Vercel, Node.js or a REST API. Hosted platforms like Shopify, Webflow and HubSpot go through a Cloudflare Worker. There's MCP access and a Reporting API too.
One naming trap: Known Agents calls its bot product "Agent Analytics", and so does Promptwatch. They overlap on crawler logs, but they are different products from different companies.
The catalog fit is publishers, ecommerce and docs teams that want to see and control bot traffic at the server or CDN, and don't need prompt tracking.
What each plan buys
We read these on knownagents.com/pricing on 20 October 2026.
| Plan | Price | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 project, 100K events a month |
| Startup | $29/mo | 3 projects, 1M events a month |
| Growth | $299/mo | 10 projects, 10M events a month |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited projects, usage-based events |
An event is any API call, including each visit you send. The free plan has a hard cap. On paid plans the company says it will email you about an upgrade if you keep going over.
What works
The free plan is real: 100K events, no card. Log-source coverage is wide, including Akamai, Fastly and Google Cloud, which plenty of tools skip. And the access controls are the agentic part. Automatic Robots.txt keeps policy current without someone watching bot lists, and bad-bot blocking runs through the WordPress plugin, WordPress VIP or a Cloudflare Worker. Spoof verification matters more than it sounds, since a fake "GPTBot" in your logs will distort any analysis built on them.
What to check before paying
Event budgeting. Because every visit counts, Known Agents suggests budgeting about twice your human visits. Busy sites leave the free tier quickly.
Your own stack's tier. Cloudflare Logpush needs Cloudflare Enterprise, and the Vercel log drain needs Vercel Pro or Enterprise. Check that before you assume a route works.
Citations. The citation counts and click-through rates are estimates inferred from AI agents retrieving your pages, as the company's own llms.txt says. They aren't observed citations in answers.
Conversions. The about page mentions conversion tracking for AI referrals, but the pages we read don't document it in detail.
Where it falls short of a full platform
It can't tell you what ChatGPT or Gemini say about your brand. That's the whole gap. You'll know which AI bot fetched your pricing page yesterday, and how many humans clicked through from ChatGPT. You won't know which prompts triggered those fetches, whether the answer recommended you or a competitor, or which other sources it cited instead. A fetch without the answer is half a diagnosis.
There's also no content step. When you find a page that bots ignore, the fix is yours to write.
When Promptwatch is the better buy
Promptwatch reads the same kind of server-side crawler logs, from Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN or a custom HTTP source. It logs ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther and the Meta AI crawler, with error tracking. The difference is the join. Those logs sit next to prompt tracking across the major engines, so the crawl-to-citation path shows whether a fetch ended up as a citation in an answer. Visitor analytics ties AI-referred sessions to conversions through a script or GTM template. And Content Agents write and publish the page that fills the gap, to Webflow, Framer or WordPress, after a review inbox.
Crawler logs start on Professional, $245/mo: 25M crawler logs, 150 prompts, 18,000 responses, 1M visitor events. Business at $579/mo raises that to 100M crawler logs. The units differ from Known Agents events, so compare on your own traffic.
Verdict
Known Agents is one of the more complete bot-analytics tools around, and the only one in this batch that executes on access control. Keep it if robots.txt policy and bot blocking are your problem. If the problem is whether AI recommends you, the logs need to be joined to answers, and that's Promptwatch's Professional plan.
FAQ
Is Known Agents the same as Dark Visitors?
Yes. Dark Visitors renamed itself Known Agents to reflect a broader product.
Does Known Agents track what ChatGPT says about my brand?
No. It measures bots fetching your pages and humans arriving from AI platforms. It does not run prompts.
Can I use Known Agents and Promptwatch together?
Yes, if you want Known Agents' blocking and robots.txt automation. For crawler logs joined to citations and conversions, see promptwatch.com.