This is the checklist version. If you have read what GEO is and want to know what to actually change, start here and work down. The order is deliberate: the early items gate the later ones.
Check that the AI crawlers can reach your site. Every other item on this list is wasted effort if they cannot, and this is the single most common reason a site is invisible in AI answers.
1. Let the crawlers in
Open your robots.txt and look for the named AI agents. If you find Disallow: / under GPTBot, you have your answer. Plenty of sites acquired those lines from a plugin default or a well-meaning contractor in 2023 and never revisited them.
Decide deliberately rather than by inheritance. Which bot does what, and what blocking each one costs you, is in GPTBot vs ClaudeBot vs PerplexityBot.
2. Make the content readable without JavaScript
Some fetchers execute JavaScript and some do not. If your key text only appears after a framework hydrates, assume half of them see an empty page. View source — actual source, not the inspector — and check your main claims are in the HTML that arrives.
3. Fix the places you contradict yourself
This one is unglamorous and it matters more than it sounds. Pick your most important facts: prices, limits, what is included, what is not. Then grep your own site for each of them.
We did this on our own site and found the pricing page saying one domain limit and an FAQ saying another, plus a comparison table still claiming “unlimited” for a tier that caps at fifteen. A retrieval model reading those pages has no way to know which is current, so it picks one, states it confidently, and sometimes picks the wrong one.
4. Put the answer in the first paragraph
Rewrite the opening of your ten most important pages so the direct answer comes before the context. Not a summary of what the page will cover. The answer.
Compare these two openings for a page about scheduling:
- “Content scheduling is an increasingly important part of modern publishing workflows.” Nothing quotable.
- “You can queue drafts for specific dates, and nothing publishes without a person approving it.” Two facts, both liftable.
5. Add a real FAQ
Questions phrased the way people ask them, answers that stand alone. “What does it cost?” beats “Pricing information”. If the answer only makes sense after reading the preceding question, rewrite it.
6. Describe structured data honestly
Add schema that reflects what is genuinely on the page. Article, FAQPage, Product, Organization. Do not mark up a FAQ that the reader cannot see, and do not claim review ratings you do not have — that is the fastest way to lose the enhancement entirely. More in schema markup for AI search.
7. Make it obvious who you are
A model that cannot work out what your company is will not confidently recommend it. One canonical About page, consistent naming everywhere, a clear description of what you sell. Entity SEO for WordPress covers this properly.
8. Date your pages
Publish and updated dates, visible to a reader and present in your markup. For anything that changes year to year, an undated page is one a model has no reason to prefer.
9. Then publish llms.txt
Last, because it is cheap and unproven. How to add llms.txt to WordPress, if you want it.
10. Measure it by hand, monthly
Twenty questions a buyer would ask, run through the engines you care about, three columns: mentioned, cited, correct. The third column is where the useful surprises live.
Common questions
How long before this shows up in AI answers?
For anything driven by live retrieval, as soon as the crawler returns — days, sometimes less. For anything that depends on training data, months, and you will not be able to attribute it. Plan against the first timeline.
Do I need to write more content?
Usually not. Most sites get more from fixing and sharpening their existing important pages than from adding new ones. An answer engine cites one source per claim, so the tenth page on a topic earns nothing.
Does page speed matter here?
Indirectly. A fetcher has a timeout, and a page that takes eight seconds to deliver its HTML sometimes does not get read. You do not need a perfect score; you need the HTML to arrive promptly.
Will AI search kill our organic traffic?
It has reduced click-through on informational queries for a lot of sites, and that trend looks durable. Queries where someone intends to do something — buy, download, sign up — still send clicks. Shifting effort toward those pages is a reasonable hedge.
Is there a plugin that does all this?
No, and be wary of one claiming to. Items 1, 2, 6, 8 and 9 have technical components a plugin can help with. Items 3, 4, 5 and 7 are editorial decisions about what your site says, which is not something software can decide for you.
Where to go next
How to optimise WordPress content for ChatGPT applies this specifically inside WordPress.
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