AI Search Optimizer Documentation

Installation

From WordPress.org (recommended)

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New.
2. Search for AI Search Optimizer.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.
4. Once activated, you’ll see a new AI Search Optimizer menu item in your admin sidebar.

Manual installation

1. Download the latest plugin ZIP from WordPress.org or citewp.com.
2. Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the ZIP file and click Install Now, then Activate.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or higher
• PHP 7.4 or higher (PHP 8.1+ recommended)
• An active site that AI crawlers can reach (no IP allowlists or aggressive bot blockers in front of
• the AI crawler user agents you want to track)

First-run setup
After activation, the plugin runs a one-time setup that creates the database tables for crawler logs, generates an initial llms.txt, and runs Cite Score on your five most-recent pages. This usually takes under 30 seconds. You’ll be redirected to the Dashboard when it completes.

Dashboard Tour

The Dashboard is your home base. Open it from AI Search Optimizer → Dashboard in the admin menu.

Hero card — Site-wide Cite Score average, week-over-week change, and a primary CTA pointing to whatever needs your attention most (usually “View Recommendations”).

KPI cards — Four metrics at a glance:

Average Cite Score across scored pages
AI Crawler Visits in the last 7 days
Pages with llms.txt entries out of total
Recommendations Open waiting for action

Needs Attention — Up to five rows surfacing the highest-impact items: pages with low scores, recent crawler errors, or new recommendations. Each row has a direct action button.

Quick Actions — Common tasks: regenerate llms.txt, run a fresh score on a specific page, view the latest crawler activity.

Pro Tip card — Rotating advice based on your current site state. Dismissible.

The Dashboard refreshes data on page load; nothing runs on a background timer in the free version.

Configuring llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file served at yourdomain.com/llms.txtt that tells AI systems which pages on your site matter most.

Where to find the settings
Go to AI Search Optimizer → Settings → llms.txt.

What gets included by default

• Your homepage and primary navigation pages
• Posts and pages with a Cite Score above your configured threshold (default: 60)
• Pages explicitly marked as featured

What gets excluded by default

• noindex pages
• Password-protected content
• Drafts, private posts, and trashed items
• Attachment pages, author archives, and date archives

Customizing the file
You can override defaults at three levels:

Global rules — set the score threshold, choose whether to include categories or tags, set max entries

Per-page — toggle Include in llms.txt from the post editor sidebar, with optional custom description

Manual entries — add external URLs or section labels that don’t map to a WordPress post

Regenerating the file
The file regenerates automatically when you publish or update a post. To force a manual regeneration, click Regenerate Now in Settings → llms.txt. The file is cached for 1 hour after generation.

Verifying it works
Visit yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a browser. You should see a plain-text file with your site name, a brief description, and a categorized list of URLs with descriptions.

Understanding Cite Score

Cite Score is a 0–100 measure of how easy it is for an AI system to extract a citable answer from a given page.

Score bands

• 80–100 — Excellent. The page is well-structured, factually dense, and ready to be cited. No urgent changes.
• 60–79 — Good. Solid baseline. Specific recommendations will push it higher.
• 40–59 — Fair. Major opportunities. Usually a missing schema, weak heading structure, or thin content.
• 0–39 — Poor. Likely not a candidate for citation in its current form. Consider rewriting or marking it noindex for AI.

What the score measures
The score combines weighted signals across four categories:

• Structure — heading hierarchy, list and table use, scannable formatting
• Semantics — answer-shaped passages, factual density, named entities, source links
• Authority — schema markup, author info, publication date, internal links
• Freshness — last-updated date, recency of content, signs of active maintenance

How to read the breakdown
On any scored page, click View Score Detail to see each category’s contribution and the specific signals that fired or didn’t. This is also where the recommendations come from.

Re-scoring
Pages re-score automatically when you update them. To force a fresh score, use the Score Now action in the page list or post editor.

Using the Recommendations Engine

The Recommendations Engine turns Cite Score signals into specific, actionable changes you can make to a page.

Where to find recommendations

• Dashboard — top-priority recommendations across the site
• Pages list — per-page recommendation count, sortable
• Post editor — sidebar panel with recommendations for the current page

Anatomy of a recommendation

Each recommendation includes:

• What — the specific issue (e.g., “Missing FAQ schema for question-style content”)
• Why it matters — the citation impact in plain language
• Estimated lift — how many points it would add to the page’s score
• How to fix it — step-by-step, often with a one-click apply for structural fixes

One-click vs. manual fixes
Some recommendations apply automatically (adding schema, generating meta descriptions, enabling Open Graph tags). Others require human judgment (rewriting a thin section, adding a source citation, restructuring headings). The Recommendations Engine never edits your content body without confirmation.

Dismissing recommendations
If a recommendation doesn’t apply to your situation, dismiss it. Dismissed recommendations don’t reappear unless the underlying signal changes significantly.

Troubleshooting

The plugin activated but I don’t see any crawler visits.

Crawler logs only populate when AI crawlers actually visit your site. If your site is new or low-traffic, give it a few days. You can also verify the detection is working by curling your site with a known user agent: curl -A "GPTBot" https://yourdomain.com/ should generate a log entry within seconds.

My llms.txt file returns a 404.

Three common causes: (1) Permalinks need flushing — go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save without changing anything. (2) A caching plugin is intercepting the request — exclude /llms.txt from cache. (3) A security plugin is blocking the request — check your firewall logs for /llms.txt.

Cite Score never finishes calculating.

If a score has been stuck on “calculating” for more than 5 minutes, it usually means WP-Cron isn’t running. Visit yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php once in a browser to manually trigger the queue, or set up a real cron job pointing at WP-Cron (recommended for production sites).

A page has a low score but I don’t agree with the reasoning.

Open the View Score Detail panel on the page. Each signal shows the raw evidence used to evaluate it. If you see a clear miscall, use the feedback button at the bottom of the detail view — those reports go directly into the scoring methodology review.

The plugin conflicts with another plugin.

AI Search Optimizer is tested against the most common WordPress plugins (Yoast, Rank Math, WooCommerce, WPML, Polylang, the major caching plugins). If you suspect a conflict, deactivate AI Search Optimizer, reproduce the issue, then reactivate. If the issue follows the plugin, file a report at citewp.com/support with the other plugin’s name and version.

I need to uninstall cleanly.

Deactivating the plugin keeps your data. To remove all plugin data — crawler logs, scores, settings — go to AI Search Optimizer → Settings → Advanced and click Delete All Plugin Data before deactivating. After confirming, deactivate and delete the plugin from the Plugins screen.