ClassifAI 3.7.0 gives site owners more control over how AI services interact with their content, starting with a new setting to block many common AI data-scraping bots through robots.txt. The release also broadens voice and local AI options with ElevenLabs support for transcripts and text to speech, plus Ollama support for Smart 404 and Term Cleanup.
The bot-blocking option is designed for convenience: instead of editing robots.txt manually, site administrators can toggle the setting and have ClassifAI add rules for widely used AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, and others. As with any robots.txt directive, it is a signal to compliant crawlers rather than a technical enforcement mechanism.
Feature highlights
- Block common AI scraping bots — Turn on the new Block AI Bots setting in ClassifAI’s registration settings to add common AI crawlers to your site’s robots.txt rules.
- ElevenLabs for speech to text — Use ElevenLabs as a provider for Audio Transcripts Generation, giving sites another option for converting uploaded audio into transcripts.
- ElevenLabs for text to speech — Generate spoken audio from text using ElevenLabs voices in the Text to Speech feature.
- Ollama for Smart 404 and Term Cleanup — Use locally hosted Ollama models to power smarter 404 suggestions and identify similar taxonomy terms for cleanup.
- More varied AI suggestions — When requesting multiple title or content resize results, ClassifAI now adjusts generation settings to encourage more distinct options.
For ElevenLabs, create an API key in your ElevenLabs account, select ElevenLabs as the provider in the relevant ClassifAI feature settings, and save your credentials. For Ollama, make sure your model is available locally before selecting it for Smart 404 or Term Cleanup.
Other improvements and fixes
- Azure OpenAI compatibility — The Azure OpenAI API version has been updated to 2024-10-21, helping features such as Key Takeaways and Content Generation work more reliably.
- Suggestion limits — Inputs that control the number of generated suggestions are now limited to 1 through 10.
- Smart Crop display — Smart crop thumbnails now appear correctly in the WordPress media UI.
- Cleaner editing screens — The Generate Titles button no longer appears on attachment edit screens where the feature is not supported.
- Settings feedback — Registration settings now show the correct error message when initially saved with empty values.
- Legacy provider removal — Microsoft Azure AI Personalizer is no longer available as a Recommendation Service provider because that Microsoft service is being retired.
If your site depended on Azure AI Personalizer for recommendations, review your configuration before updating in production and plan a move to a current provider.
For developers
- Azure API filter — A new classifai_azure_openai_api_version filter lets you override the Azure OpenAI API version used by ClassifAI.
- Speech to text class changes — Some reusable methods moved from the OpenAI Speech to Text provider class into the Audio Transcripts Generation feature class, so custom code calling those methods may need updating.
- WP-CLI cleanup — The legacy RSS Importer WP-CLI command has been removed.
- Dependency maintenance — Outdated Node dependencies were refreshed for plugin development workflows.