About this plugin
Classic SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) optimizes for being cited: AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — read your page, extract the clearest answer they can find and quote it. Content that ranks fine in classic search can still be invisible to them: buried answers, rambling paragraphs, missing structure, no machine-readable signals.
WellCited audits how well each post can be found, understood and cited by AI answer engines — and helps you fix the findings in place, inside WordPress. Every audit runs locally in PHP on your server. No accounts, no API keys, no external services.
The audit
Nineteen rules score each post from 0 to 100 across six weighted categories: answer readiness, structure, schema and extractability, freshness, authority and technical. Every finding says what is wrong and exactly how to fix it. Posts too short for a meaningful audit are labeled as such instead of getting a flattering score.
Fix in place
- Editor integration — audit button, score, category breakdown and the top three fixes right in the block editor sidebar (classic editor gets a meta box).
- Site dashboard — average score, score distribution, your ten best and worst posts, and one-click re-audit of everything.
- Answer Capsule — a block (and [wellcited_answer] shortcode) for a clearly delimited, machine-extractable direct answer near the top of the content.
- Structured data — Article, FAQ (built from your question headings), Organization, Author and Breadcrumbs JSON-LD in a single graph. Strictly additive: any type your SEO plugin already outputs is skipped, never duplicated.
- AI crawler controls — opt-in robots.txt blocks for GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, cohere-ai and Meta-ExternalFetcher. Everything stays allowed unless you decide otherwise.
- llms.txt — a plain-text content index served at /llms.txt, with automatic deference when another plugin already provides one.
- Freshness — an optional machine-readable “Last updated” line.
Honest by design
WellCited measures machine-readability signals; nobody can guarantee that any AI engine will cite you, and this plugin does not pretend to. The frontend footprint is a few hundred bytes of structured data and capsule styling, loaded only where needed, with no extra database queries.
External services
None. The free plugin makes zero external requests: no API calls, no CDN assets, no telemetry, no update pings.