--- title: "AEO Tools: What to Measure, Fix and Skip on WordPress" url: https://hostmy.blog/aeo-tools-wordpress/ date: 2026-10-19 modified: 2026-10-19 lang: en author: "Aditya Sharma" description: "AEO tools sell three different jobs under one name. Here is what to measure, what to fix in order, and what to skip on a WordPress site." categories: - "RankReady" image: https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hmb-card-2555-1024x538.jpg word_count: 1283 --- # AEO Tools: What to Measure, Fix and Skip on WordPress "AEO tools" is one label sold over three different jobs: finding out whether AI answers mention you, fixing whatever stops them from using you, and a pile of features that sound useful and change nothing. Most lists mix all three together and rank them by how many features they have. This post sorts the category the other way, into what to measure, what to fix and what to skip, with what each costs on a WordPress site. AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, and it is the same work as GEO and AI SEO under another name. If the names bother you, [our post on GEO, AEO and AI SEO](/geo-aeo-ai-seo/) covers whether the distinction matters. ## Start with what Google says The one source that is not selling a tool is Google. Its [guide to generative AI in Search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) says that optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and so is still SEO. The same page says that for Google Search you can ignore tactics such as chunking your content, creating unnecessary AI text files like llms.txt, and pursuing inauthentic mentions. It also tells owners who are weighing third-party AEO or GEO advice or services to review Google's guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice. That sets the standard for any tool. If it asks you to do something Google says you can ignore, it should be able to say why it is worth doing for a different engine. The wider comparison is in [GEO vs SEO on WordPress](/geo-vs-seo-wordpress/). ## Three jobs, and which tools do which | Job | The question it answers | What does it | Where the cost sits | | --- | ----------------------- | ------------ | ------------------- | | Measure | Are assistants naming me, and is anything reaching my site? | Your access log, your analytics, asking an assistant yourself, or a monitoring service | Free, or a monthly subscription for monitoring | | Fix | Can crawlers reach, read and quote my pages? | Server and security settings, robots.txt, structured data, how sentences are written | Mostly free, and mostly an afternoon of work | | Skip | Does it change whether I am cited? | Nothing, or nothing you can show | Whatever you are charged | The order matters. Measuring tells you where you stand, and fixing changes it. Skipping is the part that saves money, because the category is new and a lot of what is sold in it has not been shown to do anything. ## What to measure Four measurements are worth having, and three of them cost nothing. The first is crawler visits and the status codes they receive. Your access log records every request, including from AI crawlers, and the status code says whether they were served or refused. [Reading your server log for AI crawlers by hand](/read-server-log-ai-crawlers/) shows how, and [the five curl commands](/ai-crawler-test/) test the same thing from outside. The second is referrals. Readers who click through from an assistant arrive with a source such as chatgpt.com in your analytics, and a plugin that reads the referrer on the server can count them without a script. A number that stays at zero for weeks tells you something, and so does one that grows. The third is whether an assistant names you at all. The free version is to ask one about your own blog, which takes about fifteen seconds, as in [the 15 second test](/fifteen-second-brand-test/). A paid monitoring service does the same thing on a schedule and across many questions. It is the only instrument that can answer that question, and [what monitoring buys you, and what it does not](/ai-visibility-tools/) sets out where it earns its price and where it does not. The fourth is Google's own. The guide above points to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, which shows how your content performs in generative AI features on Google Search. It covers Google only, it costs nothing, and it is the one measurement here that comes from the search engine and not from a vendor. ## What to fix, in order Fix access first, because nothing else matters if a crawler is turned away. A request can be refused at the security plugin, the host firewall or the CDN before it ever reaches your robots.txt. The pieces are in [our WordPress robots.txt guide](/wordpress-robots-txt/), [the OAI-SearchBot post](/oai-searchbot-wordpress/) and [your host may be blocking AI crawlers](/host-blocking-ai-crawlers/). Then check that the page can be read. Check that the main text is in the page's HTML and not added afterwards by a script, because a simple fetch reads the HTML it is given. [Finding every page an AI cannot parse](/find-pages-ai-cannot-parse/) helps you check, and the whole sequence run by hand is in [the five layer AI SEO audit](/five-layer-ai-seo-audit/). Then structured data, the part that tells a machine what the page is. [Article, FAQPage, Speakable and Person](/structured-data-wordpress/) covers the types, and [adding schema without duplicating what Yoast writes](/schema-plugin-wordpress/) covers the trap of doing it twice. Last, the writing itself. Sentence length and where the answer sits on the page are within your control, and [writing sentences an AI can quote](/write-sentences-ai-can-quote/) and [content freshness for AI answers](/content-freshness-ai-answers/) cover both. This is the slowest fix and the one no tool can do for you. ## What to skip | If a tool offers | Why to be careful | | ---------------- | ----------------- | | A single AI score with no list of checks | You cannot act on a number you cannot decompose. Ask what is tested, as in [our read of 14 free checkers](/ai-readiness-checkers/) | | llms.txt as a ranking lever | Google says unnecessary AI text files, llms.txt among them, can be ignored for Google Search. [We generate one anyway](/llms-txt-does-not-work/), and say plainly that it does not rank anything | | Paid monitoring before access is fixed | You pay to watch yourself be turned away | | Rewriting every post into chunks | Google says you can ignore chunking for Google Search, so do not do it for Google | | Mentions you can buy or manufacture | Google says pursuing inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it seems | | A promise to get you cited | No tool controls what an assistant chooses to quote | None of this means these features are harmful. It means they should not be what you pay for, or the reason you feel you have done the work. ## Five questions for any AEO tool Put these to any tool before you install or buy it. A good answer is specific and can be checked. `1. Does it measure something, fix something, or only report a score? 2. If it fixes something, what exactly does it change on my site? 3. If it reports a score, what are the individual checks, and can I see them? 4. Does it need access to my server, or does it only look from outside? 5. What does it say it cannot do?` The last question is the most useful. A tool that cannot name a limit is selling a promise, not a feature. ## Where RankReady fits RankReady is a free WordPress plugin, and it sits on the fix side with a little measuring built in. It lets you allow or block 29 AI crawlers one by one and writes the robots.txt rules, it keeps its own log of AI crawler visits tagged by intent, it writes Article, FAQPage, Speakable and Person schema, and it generates an llms.txt, with the same caveat as above. It runs alongside Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress and does not replace them. It does not monitor whether assistants mention you, and it cannot promise that any assistant will cite you. If that is the question you need answered, a monitoring service or the 15 second test is the right instrument. To see where your site stands on the access and structure side, the free [AI Readiness Checker](https://hostmy.blog/plugins/rankready/ai-readiness-checker/) runs 41 checks against your live site, and needs no account to see the score. The plugin itself is on [WordPress.org](https://wordpress.org/plugins/rankready-ai-llm-seo/). Pick one tool you were thinking of paying for. Is it measuring something you cannot see yourself, or fixing something you cannot fix yourself?