AuditAE AI Search Toolkit

AuditAE is a free AI SEO / AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) toolkit that makes your WordPress site easier for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to read, trust, and cite. Everything works the moment you activate — zero signup, no account. AI Readiness Score. One 0–100 number, with a letter grade, that summarizes how ready your site is to be read and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — computed entirely from local signals (are citation bots blocked in robots.txt, FAQ and Article schema coverage, Organization schema, unresolved AI-bot 404s, content freshness, llms.txt). Every check that isn't passing shows exactly what to fix and how many points it's worth, and the score tracks a 7-day delta so you can see it climb as you ship fixes. Surfaced on its own tab and on the wp-admin Dashboard widget. A companion per-post AI Readiness checklist appears right in the editor sidebar — grading the post you're writing on an answer-first opening, question-shaped headings, FAQ + structured data, depth, and freshness, so you fix it before you publish. 1. AI Crawler Tracker. Identifies hits from ~30 AI search-engine crawlers — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, CCBot, Meta-ExternalAgent, Bingbot, and more. Get a real-time count of AI bot hits over the last 30 days, a by-bot breakdown with time-since-last-hit per bot, a per-day activity table, top crawled paths, one-click CSV export, and an at-a-glance wp-admin Dashboard widget. A built-in robots.txt audit flags any tracked AI bot your robots.txt is blocking — the silent killer of AI visibility. Answers the question Google Search Console can't: "Are AI engines actually reading my site?" 2. llms.txt Generator. Serves a live /llms.txt file at the root of your site, conforming to the llmstxt.org spec — a markdown manifest that helps LLM-powered tools find the right pages on your site. Builds defaults automatically from your public post types, with per-section customization, optional links list, and a one-click "Reset to defaults" if you want to start fresh. 3. Schema Graph. Per-post and site-wide schema.org JSON-LD injection. Add structured data for Organization, Article, Product, HowTo, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList — all linked together by @id so AI engines can resolve "this org wrote this article" without guessing. Designed to coexist with Yoast and Rank Math: when one of them is active, AuditAE defers the schema types they already emit (Organization, Article) and only adds the types they don't, so your pages never carry duplicate structured data. 4. IndexNow auto-ping. When you publish or update a post, the plugin instantly notifies the IndexNow API so Microsoft Bing — and the engines that read its index, including ChatGPT and Copilot retrieval — re-crawl the URL in minutes instead of waiting days to discover it on their own. A site ownership key is generated and served automatically (no manual setup), per-post noindex flags from Yoast/Rank Math are respected, and a "Submit all published URLs" button seeds the index in one shot for sites that installed the plugin after publishing. One submission fans out to Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver. 5. Image filename rename. A "Rename file" action in the Media library turns a generic IMG_4821.jpg into a descriptive, keyword-bearing red-running-shoes.jpg — the filename is one of the few image-SEO signals AI engines and image search actually read. It renames the original and every generated thumbnail size in one move, then rewrites the old URL to the new one inside your existing posts so your live images and srcset never break. Free, no account, gated by your normal WordPress permissions. 6. Query Fan-Out coverage. AI engines don't search for the phrase your reader typed. They split it into 8–12 parallel sub-queries, retrieve one passage per sub-query, and assemble the answer from those passages — so citations are won passage by passage, not page by page. A panel under the editor models the fan-out for the post you're writing (from your own focus keyword, categories, post titles and Organization schema — nothing leaves your site), splits your draft at its headings, and shows which sub-queries each passage actually answers. Missing ones sort to the top with the sub-query spelled out, so a vague "add more depth" becomes a specific "you never say what this costs". Sub-queries are grouped by the six documented fan-out types — implicit, comparative, entity-expanded, related and personalized. Free, offline, and no account. 7. Broken internal links + orphaned content. The Links tab answers both halves of the same question. Broken internal links are links in your content pointing at pages of your own that no longer resolve — a dead end for a crawler, and crawl budget spent going nowhere. Rank Math charges for a broken link checker in PRO; Yoast removed theirs. This one runs entirely on your own site with no external requests, and is deliberately conservative: archives, custom post types, uploaded files, paginated URLs, ?p= shortlinks and paths already covered by one of your redirects are all resolved before anything is called dead, because a checker that flags a working link is worse than one that misses a broken one. Links pointing at drafts, private or trashed posts are listed separately — they work while you're logged in, which is exactly why they survive so long. Orphaned content is the same problem from the other end: the tab lists every published post and page that nothing else on your site links to. A page with no incoming internal links is hard for a crawler to reach and gives an AI engine no signal that it matters. Pick one and AuditAE shows which of your existing pages already say its name in ordinary prose, and offers to link the phrase for you in one click — wrapping exactly one occurrence and changing nothing else in the post. Suggestions are verified before they're offered, so the button never fails on you. Both of these are Premium features in the big SEO plugins; here they're free. Plus FAQ schema injection. Add question-and-answer pairs to any post or page from the FAQ schema box in the editor — free, no account — and AuditAE publishes them as a schema.org FAQPage <script type="application/ld+json"> block on the post view. The pairs live in post_meta; your post content is not modified, and removing them is one click. If a Yoast or Rank Math FAQ block already covers the post, AuditAE stands down so the page never carries two FAQPage nodes. No external service is required for any of the above. All data is stored locally — crawler hits in one small dedicated table (90-day retention, dropped on uninstall), everything else in wp_options. No telemetry. Optional — pair with AuditAE (auditae.app). AuditAE is a separate paid service that measures whether AI engines cite your brand for the prompts your buyers ask. Pairing this plugin with an AuditAE account lets the AuditAE assistant (AEBOT) also draft posts, update existing posts, edit Yoast/Rank Math meta, manage the schema graph, curate /llms.txt, and edit your images end to end — rename files in bulk across the posts that matter, and write every image field (alt text, title, caption, description) — for you. On sites running the companion AuditAE AI Autopilot theme, AEBOT can additionally edit page copy, brand colors, and structured records (services, locations, FAQs, testimonials, team) in place, and your wp-admin dashboard shows live AI-citation, Analytics, and Search Console figures pulled from your AuditAE account. Pairing is fully optional; everything above remains free regardless. $5 free credit at signup, no subscription.

Recent releases are below. WordPress.org truncates this section at 5,000 characters, so older entries are kept in the plugin's development history rather than here, where they would push the current release out of view. 0.28.0

• New free feature: broken internal link checker. The Links tab now lists links in your content that point at pages of your own that no longer resolve, with the anchor text and the post each one lives in. Rank Math charges for this in PRO and Yoast removed theirs. It runs entirely on your own site — no external requests, nothing to configure — and rescans daily.
• The checker is deliberately conservative, because a checker that flags a working link is worse than one that misses a broken one: category and tag archives, custom post types, author and date archives, post type archives, uploaded files, paginated URLs, ?p= shortlinks, and any path already covered by one of your redirects are all resolved before a link is called dead.
• Links pointing at drafts, private, scheduled or trashed posts are reported separately from 404s. They resolve fine while you're logged in, which is why they go unnoticed for months, and 404 for everyone else.
• The link scan runs in short background slices with its progress saved between them, so it finishes reliably on large sites and slow shared hosting instead of timing out — the Links tab shows progress while a scan is underway.
• New free feature: Query Fan-Out coverage, in the post editor. AI engines split one search into 8–12 parallel sub-queries and quote a single passage for each, so a page can rank for its head term and still lose every citation slot. AuditAE models the fan-out for the post you're editing, splits your draft at its headings, and shows which sub-queries your passages actually answer — with the misses sorted to the top as a worklist. Runs entirely on your own server: the sub-queries are built from your focus keyword, categories, post titles and Organization schema, and nothing is sent anywhere.
• Sub-queries are typed by the six documented fan-out categories (implicit, comparative, entity-expanded, related, personalized), so you can see which kind of question your content keeps skipping rather than just how many.
• Coverage is scored on concept groups with synonyms, not literal words, so a section headed "Pricing" correctly answers "how much does it cost". A concept named in a heading scores higher than the same concept buried in body text — which is what makes a passage retrievable once an engine detaches it from the page.
• Posts built with a page builder (Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Beaver Builder, WPBakery) are skipped with an explanation rather than scored, since their content isn't in the field this analysis can read.

0.27.0

• New free feature: orphaned content report. A new Links tab lists every published post and page that nothing else on your site links to. A page with no internal links pointing at it is hard for a crawler to find and hard for an AI engine to judge important — and until now you had no way to see which of yours were in that state. Yoast charges for this report in Premium.
• New free feature: internal linking suggestions with one-click insertion. Pick an orphan and AuditAE shows you which existing pages already say its name in ordinary prose, and offers to link the phrase for you. Adding the link changes nothing else in the post: one phrase is wrapped, exactly once, in a page that already mentions it. Yoast Premium and Rank Math PRO both charge for internal link suggestions.
• Fix: the link graph is now site-wide instead of one page deep. Incoming links used to be counted only within the current page of results, so anything linked from an older post reported zero incoming links — on any real site, most of the answer was wrong. The graph is now built across the whole site, cached, and refreshed daily and whenever you edit a post.
• Fix: internal link insertion can no longer corrupt a post. The anchor phrase used to be matched anywhere in raw content — including image alt text, Gutenberg block comments, and scripts — where wrapping it in a link breaks the tag or the block. It now only ever links visible prose, and declines entirely on malformed markup.