RankReady – AI SEO, Schema, llms.txt, AEO and GEO for ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

RankReady is a WordPress plugin built for the AI search layer, the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews show before anyone reaches a blue link. Drop it in alongside your existing SEO plugin (Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO, any of them) and give those engines a clean, readable copy of everything you publish. No conflicts. No replacement. Zero frontend bloat. Visit the official RankReady page → Traditional SEO plugins optimize for Google’s classic results. RankReady adds the layer above them. Google’s Open Knowledge Format (OKF), llms.txt, FAQ schema, Markdown endpoints, WebMCP and AI crawler controls all decide how easily AI engines can find, read and understand your content. This is LLM SEO and AI search optimization for WordPress, covering generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), built to work with the WordPress SEO plugin you already use. An honest note, because a lot of plugins in this space are not. RankReady cannot promise you rankings, citations or traffic. No plugin can, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing. What it does is remove every reason an AI assistant would skip or misread your pages. Whether it then quotes you comes down to your content. AI SEO tools for WordPress — AEO, GEO and LLM SEO in one plugin llms.txt and llms-full.txt. The AI-native sitemap. An index of your best content, written for LLMs Markdown endpoints on every page. Clean .md your words, without the theme wrapped around them AI summaries and FAQ schema. Key Takeaways and FAQPage JSON-LD, generated on your click with your own LLM key Google’s Open Knowledge Format (OKF). Your whole site as one clean bundle WebMCP and MCP. A card telling AI agents and LLM clients exactly what they may read AI crawler control in robots.txt. Allow the AI bots you want, block the ones you don’t, plus Content Signals Author, Article, Speakable and FAQPage schema. E-E-A-T structured data merged into your SEO plugin, never duplicated AI visibility insights. Which AI crawlers visited, and who arrived from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini Built by HostMyBlog. Works alongside your WordPress SEO plugin — Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress and more RankReady is not a WordPress SEO plugin and does not replace one. It is the LLM SEO layer that sits on top of the SEO plugin you already run, handling AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization). Compatible with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, Slim SEO and Squirrly SEO. Every release is tested against all seven. In every one of those combinations: No duplicate schema. RankReady merges its structured data into theirs instead of printing a second block. One canonical tag. Never two. Your titles, meta descriptions and sitemaps stay theirs. RankReady does not touch them. If your SEO plugin already handles something, RankReady steps aside. AI SEO that coexists with your SEO plugin — zero frontend impact, no duplicate schema Install RankReady, optionally pick an LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or DeepSeek) for the AI Summary and FAQ schema generators, and you’re set. RankReady auto-detects your active SEO plugin and never emits duplicate schema. No JavaScript on your front end. Ever. One small stylesheet, loaded only on pages actually showing a summary, FAQ or author box No API calls on page load. All AI generation runs in the WordPress admin, on your click Core Web Vitals unaffected Bring your own LLM key. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or DeepSeek llms.txt and llms-full.txt — the AI-native sitemap for LLMs RankReady serves the llmstxt.org standard at /llms.txt (a curated index of your best content) and /llms-full.txt (the full content concatenated as Markdown). LLMs and AI crawlers read these files first to understand your site. It is the single highest-leverage AI SEO file you can publish. Configurable post types, max post count, category and tag exclusions, and a per-domain brand identity you control from the AI Crawlers tab. /llms.txt. A curated index of your best content /llms-full.txt. Your full content as one Markdown file You choose what goes in. Post types, maximum count, category and tag exclusions Your brand, stated once. Site name, summary and about section, set from the AI Crawlers tab Multilingual ready. Emits hreflang discovery links when WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot or GTranslate is detected AI Summary generator — Key Takeaways with Speakable schema, any LLM Generate “Key Takeaways” for any post or page using your chosen LLM. Short, quotable AI summaries are what an answer engine lifts when it builds a response. Sits above your content as a styled block your readers see too Carries Speakable schema, the JSON-LD that voice assistants read aloud Generate from anywhere. The Regenerate button in the post editor, the Gutenberg block, or the Elementor widget OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini or DeepSeek Unlimited manual generations. No caps, no counters FAQ schema generator — FAQPage JSON-LD from real questions A strong signal for AI Overviews. RankReady can query DataForSEO for the real “People Also Ask” questions ranking for your post’s focus keyword, then has your chosen LLM write the answers. Output is FAQPage JSON-LD, the structured data Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI search engines can read directly, instead of inferring Q&A pairs from plain article text. Don’t use DataForSEO? Type your own questions and let the LLM answer them. Pulls real “People Also Ask” questions ranking for your focus keyword, via DataForSEO Writes the answers with your chosen LLM Outputs FAQPage JSON-LD, a documented schema.org type No DataForSEO? No problem. Type your own questions and let the AI answer them Unlimited manual generations Setup guide is in the FAQ section below. Author Box with E-E-A-T schema and Person JSON-LD E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is how search engines and AI models judge which sources to trust. It is the framework Google sets out in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. RankReady ships a basic Author Box with name, job title, employer, bio, headshot and basic sameAs links, published as Person JSON-LD alongside Article, Speakable and FAQPage schema, so AI search engines and LLMs can attribute your content to a real author. It auto-detects Rank Math, Yoast and AIOSEO and skips duplicate output. Author details. Name, job title, employer, bio, headshot sameAs links connecting the author to their profiles elsewhere Article, Speakable and FAQPage JSON-LD included Never doubles up. Detects Rank Math, Yoast and AIOSEO and defers to their E-E-A-T output Place it anywhere. Gutenberg block or Elementor widget Markdown endpoints — clean .md pages for AI agents and LLMs Every published post and page is served as clean Markdown at /post-slug.md with YAML frontmatter (title, author, dates, language, description, categories, tags). AI agents and LLM clients such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and custom clients all work far more cheaply with clean Markdown than with a full HTML page. Content negotiation via Accept: text/markdown lets crawlers fetch the format they prefer with no URL changes. Add .md to any URL. yoursite.com/your-post.md Or ask by header. Agents sending Accept: text/markdown get Markdown at your normal URL Your visitors are unaffected. Browsers still get the normal page Frontmatter included. Title, author, dates, language, description, categories and tags The size difference is the point. A normal page carries your theme, sliders, popups and scripts. The Markdown version carries your words. On our own site a page drops from 4.7 MB to 18 KB, roughly 260 times smaller, so an AI reaches your actual content instead of running out of room before it gets there. Which AI agents and LLMs read Markdown today They ask for Markdown: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot Chat and CLI, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, OpenCode Halfway: OpenAI’s Codex CLI reads your page first, then follows the Markdown link RankReady adds Not yet: ChatGPT browsing, Gemini and Perplexity still request the normal page That last line is why RankReady never relies on Markdown alone. llms.txt, the .md pages and your schema all cover the tools that have not caught up. Open Knowledge Format (OKF) — Google’s AI agent standard for your whole site Google’s Open Knowledge Format (OKF v0.1) hands your whole site to AI agents as one clean bundle of Markdown, instead of making them scrape your HTML. It is vendor neutral, so it works for Google AI Overviews and every other engine alike. Turn it on from the AI Crawlers tab and RankReady serves a complete bundle at /okf/: /okf/index.md, a manifest of every page on your site, grouped by type, each linked to its concept file /okf/{slug}.md, one Markdown concept per post, tagged with type, description, canonical URL and tags /okf/log.md, a dated change history so an agent sees what is new One-click .zip export for upload to Google Cloud Knowledge Catalog or a Git repository Built entirely on your own server. Nothing is sent to Google or anyone else. It refreshes when you publish or edit, and anything set to noindex stays out of it. WebMCP and MCP — let AI agents discover your content RankReady publishes a WebMCP card on your site: a short file telling an AI agent exactly what it may read, so it can ask properly instead of scraping. WebMCP and MCP are how AI agents are learning to discover a site’s content programmatically. Nothing extra to run. No bundled server, no separate service Read only. Agents can look. They can never change anything Public content only. Users, settings, plugins and themes are never listed It also registers those abilities with the Model Context Protocol through the WordPress Abilities API, so on WordPress 7.0 the official MCP Adapter picks them up automatically. Insights — AI visibility, AI crawler activity and referrals The Insights tab is your AI visibility dashboard: real, server-side AI SEO analytics on AI crawler activity and AI referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, with no third-party scripts. Training and citation bots. Which AI crawlers fetched which pages: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended and more, split into training crawlers and the ones that fetch a page while answering someone. A visit means your page was read, not that you were quoted. Real AI referrals. Real people clicking through from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com, tracked from the HTTP referer. Content freshness scanner. Buckets your posts into Fresh, Going stale and Stale, with a one-click dateModified refresh to signal recency to AI crawlers. All counts are stored on your own server. Nothing is sent to HostMyBlog. AI crawler control — allow or block 29 AI bots in robots.txt Most AI SEO plugins only let you invite AI crawlers. RankReady also lets you block them, per bot, straight from your robots.txt. Allow or block, bot by bot. 29 AI crawlers listed by name, including GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, Applebot-Extended, Bingbot, Meta-ExternalAgent, FacebookBot, MistralAI-User, Bytespider, Amazonbot, cohere-ai, DuckAssistBot, YouBot, PhindBot, CCBot, AI2Bot, Diffbot and PetalBot Stop a scraper hammering your server. Bytespider and CCBot are the usual suspects Let search in, keep training out Block always wins. If a bot is ticked in both lists, blocking is what happens Nothing changes until you ask. Leave the block list empty and your robots.txt stays exactly as it was Your choices are written straight into your robots.txt, both the WordPress virtual robots.txt and a physical robots.txt file if another plugin has taken that URL over. It also adds Content Signals, the newer standard that lets you state what your content may be used for. You control the ai-train, search and ai-input directives separately. Compatible with your caching plugin, CDN and host Caching is the number one reason llms.txt, Markdown and robots.txt quietly stop working. RankReady writes the right bypass rules into your caching plugin’s own settings, so they hold at server level. Compatible with: WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Breeze, SG Optimizer, Hummingbird, Cache Enabler, Comet Cache, Swift Performance, NitroPack, Perfmatters, Cloudflare APO, Pantheon, Kinsta and WP Engine. On Cloudflare it can create the cache rule for you from the Settings tab. Diagnostics — 22 live checks Tests every file live. Not a checklist. It actually fetches them Spots conflicts with your active SEO plugins and caching plugins, and checks rewrite rules and REST routes Every failure comes with a one-line fix One-click report you can paste into a support ticket Coming soon in RankReady AI SEO Everything above is free AI SEO, with no caps on manual generation. In development: auto-generate and bulk-generate AI Summaries and FAQs, HowTo and ItemList schema, deeper author schema, custom post types, and headless plus WPGraphQL support. These are marked “Coming soon” inside the plugin and are not available yet. Privacy & Third-Party Services Your post content never leaves your site unless you ask for it. Your API keys stay in your own database, and every AI service below runs on your own key. Plugin usage data (Freemius). Terms · Privacy. Opt-in only, and skippable on activation. If you allow it, sends your site URL, WordPress and PHP versions, your name and email, active plugins and theme, and activation events. Never your post content, API keys or visitor data. Opt out any time from the Plugins page. AI providers. Pick one. When you click Generate, that post’s title and text go to your chosen provider and the reply is saved on your site. Nothing else is shared. OpenAI. Terms · Privacy Anthropic Claude. Terms · Privacy Google Gemini. Terms · Privacy DeepSeek. Terms · Privacy Optional extras. These only run if you set them up. DataForSEO. Terms · Privacy. Sends your focus keyword when you run the FAQ Generator. Never your article text. Cloudflare. Terms · Privacy. Only if you connect it. Sends your zone ID and API credentials so RankReady can add or remove one cache rule and clear changed pages. No post content is ever sent. HostMyBlog tips email. Terms · Privacy. Only if you opt in from the setup wizard or the dashboard. Sends your first name and email address once for that admin account. Leave it unticked / don’t submit and nothing is sent.

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. 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Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.