About this plugin
SEOBetter is an AI SEO plugin for WordPress built for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): earning LLM citations from AI answer engines – Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini – while still ranking in classic Google search. txt file that AI crawlers use to find your best pages.
SEOBetter works alongside Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress. It does not replace them; it syncs its meta and schema into whichever one you already use.
No plugin can guarantee that an AI engine will cite you. SEOBetter measures and improves the signals research links to citation, and SEOBetter Pro shows whether ChatGPT search and Perplexity actually cite your site. The free plugin uses your own AI key; Pro includes the hosted SEOBetter Cloud, so there are no keys to manage.
AI SEO, GEO, AEO and LLM citations: what they mean
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making content easy for AI answer engines to understand, trust and cite. Where classic SEO targets a ranking position, GEO targets a citation: your page being named as a source inside an AI-generated answer. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the same goal seen from the question side: structuring pages so an AI engine can lift a direct answer from them.
LLM citations are the result: your URL named as a source by a large language model in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity or Gemini. AI SEO is the umbrella term for optimizing for both classic search and AI search at once, and it is what SEOBetter measures and improves. Research on generative engines (Princeton, 2023) found that adding cited sources, quotations and statistics raised a page’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.
SEOBetter measures exactly those signals and tells you which ones each post is missing.
What SEOBetter does for free
- GEO score (0-100) and SEOBetter content score for every post and page, with a prioritized list of concrete fixes: missing citations, statistics, quotes, direct answers, structure and freshness.
- AI article generation with your own AI key. Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, Moonshot AI (Kimi), OpenRouter, a self-hosted Ollama model, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Gemini and Groq offer free-tier keys. Your key stays on your site and you pay your provider directly. The first 30 articles per site are Cloud-assisted: the hosted SEOBetter service supplies the tuned writing prompt and your key writes the article. After that, the plugin’s built-in engine writes new articles on your key, and the Generate page tells you when that switch has happened.
- Real references in every article. A free Tavily research key (1,000 searches per month on their free plan) is required for generation; it is what gives every article verifiable source links instead of unsourced AI text.
- Three content types – blog post, how-to and listicle – in English, localized for the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland.
- On-page SEO meta and JSON-LD schema: Article, FAQ, HowTo, Breadcrumb, ItemList, Product and Organization markup, synced to Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress when present.
- llms.txt and an AI-crawler access audit with a one-click robots.txt fix, so ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI crawlers can reach and index your best content.
- Markdown copies of every post for AI crawlers. Every published post and page is also served as plain markdown at its own URL with.md in place of the trailing slash (or?format=markdown), marked noindex with a canonical link back to the normal URL so Google indexes only the original. Never served for drafts, private, password-protected or noindexed posts, or for content a membership plugin restricts. A setting turns it off.
- AI visits: daily counts of AI crawler visits and visitors referred from AI tools, per post, with no IP addresses, cookies or visitor profiles stored, only daily totals. See the daily totals, by named AI crawler and by referring AI tool, in the post editor, in a column on Posts and Pages, and on the dashboard. The free plan keeps 30 days of history.
- Google Search Console connection for ranking, impression and freshness data inside WordPress.
- Internal-link orphan report and an age-based content-freshness inventory.
- Technical SEO auditor, readability and AI-pattern checks, and a humanizer pass.
- Free stock images from Pexels, with an Openverse fallback.
How SEOBetter gets your content cited by AI
AI answer engines favour pages that are easy to verify. SEOBetter builds those signals in rather than bolting them on:
- Sourced claims. Generated articles cite real, live pages found by keyword-targeted research, and the plugin verifies each link before it ships.
- Quotable structure. Direct answers under question-shaped headings, key takeaways, FAQ blocks and definitions – the shapes AI engines extract from.
- Structured data. JSON-LD schema that tells machines what the page is, who wrote it and what questions it answers.
- Discoverability. An llms.txt file and a crawler audit that flags when robots.txt or a firewall is blocking AI crawlers.
- Freshness. Search Console decay signals show which pages are losing citations and need a refresh.
Free vs Pro
The free plugin is complete on its own and never expires. SEOBetter Pro adds the hosted SEOBetter Cloud (no API keys to manage) plus the full content library:
- AI Citations: see whether ChatGPT search and Perplexity cite your site for the questions your buyers ask, who they cite instead, and a writing brief for each gap. Questions are included on every paid plan, with an add-on for more.
- GEO Optimizer: adds statistics, quotations and cited sources to posts you have already published.
- llms-full.txt with the full text of every article (Pro+).
- 21 content types in total, including comparison, buying guide, review, pillar guide, recipe, case study, news article, press release and white paper.
- 29 languages and localization for 78 countries.
- Advanced schema: LocalBusiness, Recipe, Review, Event, Course, JobPosting, VideoObject, SoftwareApplication, QAPage and more, plus Gutenberg schema blocks.
- AI featured images in your brand colours, Brand Voice profiles, deep SERP research, GSC-driven freshness diagnostics, an internal-link suggester in the editor, and bulk CSV generation on the Agency plan.
com/pricing, then paste your license key under SEOBetter → Settings → License. The Download Pro button appears immediately; install the Pro plugin over the free one and your settings carry across. com.
Privacy
No external request is made on activation or on normal page loads – only in response to an action you take, such as clicking Generate or connecting Search Console. The External services section below lists every service, what is sent, when, and each provider’s terms and privacy policy.
AI visits are counted in a table on your own site’s database, never on an external server. Each row is one day, one post, and one AI crawler or AI-referral source, with a running count of how many times it was seen. No IP address, user agent string, cookie or visitor id is ever stored with the counts.
To avoid counting the same AI-referred visitor twice, rate limiting keeps a one-way hashed marker for one hour, never the IP address itself, in your site’s own database, and then it expires. The small script that counts a visitor arriving from an AI tool (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and others) sends that count to your own site only, over your site’s own REST API – never to an external service.
External services
This plugin connects to several external services to provide its functionality. For each, we describe what the service is, what data is sent, and when. No external request is made on activation or on normal page loads – only in response to an action you take.
SEOBetter Cloud API (api.seobetter.com)
What it is: SEOBetter’s own cloud service that performs AI article generation, topic research, places/local-business grounding, price verification, and license validation.
What is sent: your generation inputs (topic, keywords, content type, language, country, and related prompt settings), your site URL, and your license key if you have entered one. For topic research, the keyword or seed topic.
When it is sent: only when you click Generate, request topic suggestions, or after you have entered a license key (validation). No data is sent on activation or on normal page loads.
Allowance: on the free plan the service supplies the tuned writing prompt for the first 30 articles per site (Cloud-assisted generation; your own key still writes the article). Once that allowance is used, or on a private hostname such as localhost, the service declines the request and the plugin’s built-in engine writes the article instead. Generation never stops; a notice on the Generate page reports the switch.
Optional places-data keys: if you save a Foursquare, HERE, or Google Places API key under Settings – Places Integrations, that key is included in generation and research requests so the SEOBetter Cloud API can query the matching places provider on your behalf to ground local-business content in real listings. Nothing is sent to those providers directly from your site. com/privacy
What is NOT sent: your WordPress admin password, password hashes, secret keys/salts, auth cookies, or your site visitors’ personal data.
Provided by SEOBetter. com/privacy
Your own AI provider – bring your own key (OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, Moonshot AI (Kimi), Ollama, or a custom endpoint)
What it is: instead of the SEOBetter Cloud API, you can enter your own API key for a third-party AI provider, and the plugin then calls that provider directly to generate article text. You choose the provider and paste the key in Settings; no third-party key is configured by default.
What is sent: your API key (only to the provider it belongs to) and your generation inputs (topic, keywords, content type, language, country, and the related prompt text).
When it is sent: only when you click Generate while a provider key is configured. Nothing is sent on activation or on normal page loads.
Each provider is an independent company with its own terms and privacy policy:
ai/privacy
com/policies/privacy-policy/
com/legal/privacy
com/privacy
com/privacy-policy/
ai/docs/agreement/userprivacy
– Ollama (a server you run yourself, local or self-hosted): requests go only to the endpoint URL you configure. com/
If you configure a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint, requests go only to the URL you enter.
Google Search Console / Google OAuth (accounts.google.com, oauth2.googleapis.com, www.googleapis.com)
What it is: Google’s Search Console API, used to import your site’s search-ranking and impression data.
What is sent: the OAuth authorization you grant, and your verified site URL when querying ranking/impression data.
When it is sent: when you connect Search Console, and when you (or a sync you enabled) refresh ranking data.
Provided by Google LLC. com/privacy
Pexels (api.pexels.com, images.pexels.com)
What it is: Pexels’ royalty-free stock-image API, used for in-editor image search.
What is sent: your image search query.
When it is sent: when you search for an image.
Provided by Pexels. com/privacy-policy/
Openverse (api.openverse.org)
What it is: the Openverse open-licensed media API, used for in-editor image search.
What is sent: your image search query.
When it is sent: when you search for an image.
org privacy policy. org/about/privacy/
OpenStreetMap / Nominatim (nominatim.openstreetmap.org)
What it is: the OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocoding service, used to ground local-business content in real places.
What is sent: the location or place name you supply.
When it is sent: when you generate location-based content, or use the geocode button in a schema block, that requires geocoding.
Provided by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. org/wiki/Privacy_Policy
Tavily (api.tavily.com)
What it is: an AI web-search API used to gather authoritative sources and citations during article generation. Required for article generation on the Free tier (it powers the reference links in every article); you provide your own key, and Tavily’s free plan includes 1,000 searches per month.
What is sent: your Tavily API key and the search query (your keyword and related citation terms).
When it is sent: only when you generate or optimize content and have configured a Tavily key.
Provided by Tavily. com/
DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com)
What it is: DuckDuckGo web search, used as a no-key fallback to find supporting sources and citations during article generation.
What is sent: the search query derived from your topic and keyword.
When it is sent: only during content generation, and only when a keyed search provider (such as Tavily) is not configured.
Provided by DuckDuckGo. com/privacy
Crossref (api.crossref.org)
What it is: the Crossref scholarly metadata API, used to validate DOIs and citation metadata in academic/scholarly content.
What is sent: the DOI or citation identifier being validated.
When it is sent: only during generation of content that includes scholarly references.
Provided by Crossref. org/operations-and-sustainability/privacy/
Lorem Picsum (picsum.photos)
What it is: a placeholder-image service, used as a last-resort image when no Pexels or Openverse result is available.
What is sent: only the requested image dimensions (no personal or site data).
When it is sent: only when a placeholder image is inserted during content generation.
Provided by Lorem Picsum. photos/
Bunny Stream (iframe.mediadelivery.net)
What it is: the video host for SEOBetter’s optional 3-minute intro video on the Settings screen.
What is sent: nothing on a normal page view – the player is click-to-load, so your browser only requests the video from Bunny Stream after you press play (a standard embedded-video request).
When it is sent: only when you press play on the intro video.
o. net/privacy/
DeskCrew (deskcrew.io)
What it is: DeskCrew hosts the SEOBetter product changelog. The plugin shows those changelog entries in the admin Announcements drawer.
io for the public changelog (a read-only JSON feed identified by a publishable key). The request carries no personal data. io is loaded.
When it is sent: only while viewing a SEOBetter admin screen, and the result is cached for several hours. Nothing is sent on activation or on front-end page loads.
Provided by DeskCrew. io/privacy