What a Free AEO Plugin Does for WordPress, and What It Can’t Promise

TWA AEO is the free plugin that sits behind my themes. I explain why it exists in Why WordPress Won’t Let a Free Theme Do SEO, So I Split Mine in Two: the things a site needs to be read well by search engines and AI assistants are, by WordPress.org rules, plugin territory. This article explains what the plugin actually does, in plain terms.

It describes the site in a language machines read

The most important job is structured data. Google describes structured data as “a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.” Instead of leaving a search engine or an AI assistant to guess what a page is, structured data states it.

TWA AEO produces it for the whole site from information the owner enters once:

• Who is behind the site: the organisation or person, with a description and a logo.
• What each page is: an article, a pillar page, a profile, a product page, an event.
• Who wrote it: the author, linked to their profile.
• How pages relate: which articles belong to which main topic.

When the owner changes a detail, it changes everywhere. Nobody has to edit code on each page.

It gives the site a clear structure

Machines, like people, understand a site better when it is organised. The plugin lets each article belong to a main topic, with a pillar page that introduces the topic and lists its articles. That structure appears to visitors in the pillar pages, breadcrumbs and blog map of the themes, and to machines in the structured data.

It also holds the content fields that the theme templates show: an article’s key takeaways, its frequently asked questions and its sources; an author’s details; the facts of a record or an event. Because they live in the plugin, they survive a change of theme.

It lets the owner decide which AI crawlers may read the site

AI companies run different crawlers for different purposes. OpenAI, for example, documents that its OAI-SearchBot is “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”, while GPTBot “is used to crawl content that may be used in training” its models, and that each can be allowed or blocked independently.

Many site owners do not know this, and some block everything by accident, or allow everything without realising it. TWA AEO puts the choice in one settings screen, in plain words: appear in AI search answers, contribute to model training, both or neither. The plugin writes the rules; the owner makes the decision.

It generates an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a proposal, made by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024, for a plain text file that gives AI systems a short guide to a site’s most important content. I want to be honest about it: it is a proposed format, not an agreed standard, and the major AI companies have not confirmed that their assistants use it. Google has said publicly that it does not.

So why include it? Because it costs nothing, it does no harm, and it is a clean summary of the site that any system can read if it chooses to. The plugin builds it from the site’s own structure and keeps it up to date.

It takes care of practical details

Some of what affects how a site is read is unglamorous:

• Redirects. When a page’s address changes, the old address should send people and machines to the new one instead of to an error.
• Image care. Images should have descriptions and sensible sizes, which helps accessibility, speed and understanding.
• Search signals. The plugin keeps a record of addresses that led to errors and searches on the site that found nothing. Those are clues to what visitors expected and did not find.

What it does not promise

No plugin can guarantee that Google, ChatGPT or any other assistant will use or cite a site. Anyone who promises that is selling something. What a plugin can do is remove obstacles and give machines clear, accurate information. Whether a site is chosen as a source still depends on whether its content is genuinely useful.

That is why the plugin is free, and complete. It does the whole job on its own, in line with WordPress.org’s rule that free plugins must not lock features behind a payment. Plumb, its paid version, adds more on top, which I explain in Free vs Premium WordPress Plugins: When It’s Worth Paying.