AI search and WordPress

More and more questions are answered by an assistant or by a summary at the top of a search page, with a few links to where the answer came from. This subject is about being one of those links, for a site that runs on WordPress.

A great deal is said about it, and little of it by the engines themselves. So every page here says what each statement stands on: something an engine documents, something a study found, or guesswork. Google's own position is the plainest. It says that getting into its AI answers is the same work as getting into search, and that nothing extra is required.

Nothing here promises that an assistant will name your site. Nobody can promise that.

Start here. Generative engine optimization: what is documented, what was studied and what is guesswork is the whole picture in one place.

Google's AI answers. How to appear in Google's AI Overviews covers what Google says is needed, the report in Search Console that shows where you appeared, and the switch that takes a site out.

Their crawlers. An assistant cannot quote a page its crawler cannot reach. Blocking or allowing AI crawlers on WordPress covers robots.txt, a CDN or a host that blocks them before WordPress is asked, and how to tell which you have. The file itself is explained in where robots.txt is in WordPress.

llms.txt. A plugin may already have made you one. llms.txt on WordPress says what it is, who reads it and whether to bother.

The basics still decide it. A page that is blocked or asks not to be listed is out of AI answers too. Check with the page indexing check, and see a WordPress site that is not on Google.