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. Orphaned content + internal linking. The Links 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. 0.27.0

• 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.
• Performance: resolving a link to a post no longer runs WordPress's URL parser once per link. Both link endpoints previously did, which meant queries proportional to the number of links on the page; they now use a lookup table built once per scan.
• Fix: uninstalling the plugin left four keys behind — the two schema probe caches added in 0.26.0 and their stored results. They are now removed with everything else.
• Fix: the orphan report no longer lists your front page or blog index, which are reached from your navigation and, in the front page's case, cannot receive a measurable content link at all.
• Fix: the link graph now works on sites using Plain permalinks. Every URL there names its post as ?p=123, which path matching ignored — so everything was reported as an orphan. ?p= shortlinks in content now also count on any permalink structure.
• Fix: renaming a large image no longer destroys its scaled copy. Uploads past WordPress's big-image threshold keep a scaled working copy beside the pristine original; renaming mapped both to the same new filename, and the second move silently overwrote the first. The renamed copy now keeps its -scaled suffix.
• Fix: redirects created from a full URL on a site installed in a subdirectory pointed at a doubled path (/blog/blog/page) and 404'd. Destinations are now stored home-relative, and existing rules self-correct when they fire.
• Fix: literal backslashes in content written through the connected assistant (Windows paths, regular expressions, escaped JSON) were silently stripped on save, and again on every edit. All write paths now preserve them.
• Fix: this changelog had grown past the 5,000-character limit and was being silently truncated on WordPress.org, hiding the most recent entries.

0.26.0

• New free feature: FAQ schema editor in the post editor. Add question-and-answer pairs to any post or page from a metabox and AuditAE publishes them as schema.org FAQPage JSON-LD. No account, no pairing, and your post content is never modified. Previously FAQ schema could only be written by the paid assistant, which made it the one AI Readiness Score check with no free fix.
• New: the Score tab's FAQ row opens a filtered Posts list showing only the published posts still missing FAQ schema, so the score becomes a worklist. Two other checks (content freshness, AI crawler activity) also gained free actions.
• Fix: FAQ coverage no longer scores 0 on sites using Yoast or Rank Math FAQ blocks. The site-wide score counted only AuditAE's own FAQ meta, while the per-post checklist and the front end both counted the other plugins' blocks. All three surfaces now agree.
• Fix: the Organization schema check no longer awards points for schema that isn't on the page. It passed as soon as Yoast or Rank Math was installed — but Yoast emits no Organization node until you set a site name, and Rank Math emits nothing until its setup wizard runs. It now verifies against your live homepage, falls back to reading the SEO plugin's settings, and stays quiet when it can't get clear evidence.
• Fix: the Article / Product schema check had the same false positive and is fixed the same way, against a real post rather than the homepage.