Short version: Bot Ledger is a free, static, no-signup directory and policy-file generator. Known Agents is a freemium SaaS platform — a directory plus live analytics, blocking, and an identification API, gated behind an account and, past the free tier, a monthly bill. They overlap on "what bots exist" and diverge everywhere past that. Details below.
01 — The Comparison
| Dimension | Bot Ledger | Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors) |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no tiers | Freemium — Free (1 project / 100K events), $29/mo Startup, $299/mo Growth, custom Enterprise |
| Account required | No | Yes (free tier needs no card) |
| Crawler directory | 32 entries, hand-verified against operator docs | Hundreds of entries across many categories |
| robots.txt generator | Yes — instant, client-side | Yes — platform-managed, with automatic updates |
| llms.txt generator | Yes | Not a core feature |
| Live bot traffic analytics | No | Yes — real-time referral tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more |
| Bot blocking / firewall | No — generates the policy file, you own enforcement | Yes, built in |
| Raw data access | Open bots.json, correctable via GitHub PR | Browsable directory; deeper data behind account |
| Underlying tech | Static HTML/JS, no backend | Hosted platform with integrations (Cloudflare, AWS, WordPress, and more) |
02 — Which one you actually want
If you need a robots.txt or llms.txt today and don't want to create an account for it, use Bot Ledger — that's the entire job it's built for. If you need ongoing analytics on which AI systems are hitting your site, referral tracking from AI chat platforms, or automated blocking with platform integrations, Known Agents does that and Bot Ledger deliberately doesn't try to.
Nothing here stops you from using both — Bot Ledger costs nothing to try first.
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