Make Your WordPress Site Visible to AI in Under 5 Minutes

I've spent the past year writing AI discovery file specifications, running adoption studies, building a free checker tool, and writing about why businesses need to be visible to AI systems. But every time I talked to a WordPress site owner about actually creating these files, the conversation hit the same wall: "I don't know how to make a JSON file."

Fair enough. Most people running a plumbing business or an accountancy practice shouldn't need to know what JSON is. So I built a plugin that takes care of the technical side. Install it, fill in your business details, click Generate. Done. Ten files, five minutes, zero coding.

The AI Discovery Files plugin is free, open source (GPL v2), and on wordpress.org right now. No premium tiers, no upsells, no feature gating. Here's what it does and why it matters.

The Problem: 99.7% of UK Websites Are Invisible to AI

When we checked 100 UK small businesses in ChatGPT, only 3 were visible. Three. The rest didn't show up at all, or worse, ChatGPT gave out wrong information about them.

Our Q1 2026 adoption study put harder numbers on it. We crawled nearly 2,000 domains and found that 99.7% of UK websites have zero AI discovery files. Not one. These businesses are invisible to every AI assistant their customers are using.

And customers are using them. ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users globally. In the UK alone, 16 million people use it monthly. When someone asks "recommend a plumber in Kettering" or "which accountant should I use in Leicester," ChatGPT pulls from whatever it can find. If your website doesn't tell it who you are, it guesses. Or it recommends your competitor.

Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, put it well in his 2026 predictions for Search Engine Land:

"We're already seeing a massive rise in agentic crawlers, AI that searches and acts on behalf of users."

Jim Yu, CEO, BrightEdge

That trend is only accelerating. Your customers aren't just typing queries into Google any more. They're asking AI assistants to make decisions for them. If your business doesn't exist in the data those assistants can read, you don't get recommended. Full stop.

What the Plugin Generates: 10 Files, Three Tiers

The plugin generates all 10 files defined in the AI discovery file specifications. Each file serves a different purpose for AI systems:

AI Discovery Files and what each one tells AI systems

File	What It Tells AI	Tier
llms.txt	Your business identity, services, and key pages in a format LLMs prefer	Essential
ai.txt	Permissions for AI crawling and content usage	Essential
ai.json	Structured data about your business for machine parsing	Recommended
identity.json	Canonical business facts: name, address, services, contact	Recommended
brand.txt	How to represent your brand correctly (spelling, tone, claims)	Recommended
faq-ai.txt	Pre-verified Q&A pairs AI can quote directly	Recommended
developer-ai.txt	Technical context (stack, APIs, integrations)	Complete
robots-ai.txt	Granular AI crawler access rules	Complete
llms.html	Human-readable version of llms.txt with styling	Complete
llm.txt	Alias for llms.txt (some crawlers check both)	Complete

You don't have to generate all 10 at once. The Essential tier gives you the two most important files. Recommended adds four more that cover identity and brand. Complete fills in the rest. Start with Essential, add more when you're ready.

The difference between a site with zero files and a site with even the Essential two is enormous. It's the difference between ChatGPT saying "I don't have information about that business" and actually recommending you by name with accurate details.

Five Minutes From Install to Done

Here's the actual process:

Step 1: Install. Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Search "AI Discovery Files." Click Install, then Activate. Takes about 30 seconds.

Step 2: Fill in your details. The plugin gives you a form where you describe your business: who you are, what you do, where you're based, your services, contact details, FAQs. It pulls a few basics from WordPress (site name, tagline, published pages), but the real value comes from what you put in. The more detail you provide, the better AI systems will understand your business. A plumber who lists their service areas, specialisms, and opening hours will get far better AI recommendations than one who just types a company name and postcode.

Step 3: Generate. Pick your tier (Essential, Recommended, or Complete) and click Generate. The plugin takes everything you've entered, formats it into the correct file specifications, validates the syntax, and deploys the files to your site root. That's the part that would normally require a developer.

The whole thing runs only on the settings page. It doesn't add a single line of code to your frontend. No JavaScript injected into your pages, no extra database queries on every page load, no performance hit whatsoever. Your visitors won't notice it's there. But AI systems will.

If you already have AI discovery files on your site (maybe a developer created them manually), the plugin will warn you before overwriting anything. It detects existing physical files and lets you choose whether to replace them or leave them alone.

What Our Web Design Clients Keep Asking Us

Since we published our guide to AI visibility back in January, we've had a steady stream of calls and emails from clients. The questions are different each time, but they're all circling the same problem. Here are a few (names changed, but the questions are almost word for word):

"My competitor has been open for two years. I've been running my electrical business for fifteen. When I ask ChatGPT to recommend an electrician near me, they show up and I don't. How is that possible?"

Paul W., electrical contractor, Northamptonshire

It's not about how long you've been trading, Paul. ChatGPT doesn't know your business history unless you tell it. Your competitor probably doesn't have AI discovery files either, but ChatGPT found a mention of them on a review site or directory listing. The fix is giving these AI systems your information directly, in a format they're designed to read. That's what this plugin helps you do. Fill in your business details, your services, your service areas, and the plugin formats it all into files AI systems can read. Five minutes of your time, and ChatGPT has your name, services, location, and contact details straight from you.

"We redesigned our website last year and it cost us £8,000. Are you saying we need to spend more money on AI stuff now?"

Karen M., dental practice manager, Corby

Not a penny. Your new website is still doing its job for Google and for visitors. AI discovery files sit alongside your website; they don't replace anything. And this plugin is completely free. No premium version, no monthly fee, no hidden costs. If you're on WordPress, which you are, install it and you're sorted. Your £8,000 website just got more visible at zero extra cost.

"I asked Google's AI about my restaurant and it said we close at 9pm. We close at 11pm. People are turning up and the kitchen's been closed for an hour because they checked AI instead of our website."

Ravi P., restaurant owner, Kettering

This is the problem identity.json was built to solve, Ravi. Right now, Google's AI is pulling your hours from whatever source it finds first, maybe an old TripAdvisor listing, maybe a cached Google Business entry you forgot to update. An identity.json file on your website tells AI systems directly: here are our hours, here's our address, here's our menu. It's your data, in your words, from your website. The plugin gives you a form to enter all of this and then formats it into a proper identity.json file. Put your correct hours in, and that's what AI systems will use.

"Our marketing agency charges us £500 a month for SEO. Should they be doing this AI stuff too, or is it separate?"

Helen D., property management company, Market Harborough

They absolutely should be. AI discovery files and SEO work together. SEO gets you into Google's results. AI discovery files get you into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. If your agency isn't talking about AI visibility yet, forward them this article. Or just install the plugin yourself; it takes five minutes and doesn't interfere with anything they're doing.

For Developers and Agencies: Hooks and Multisite

If you're a web designer or agency managing client sites, the plugin has developer hooks built in. Two filters let you modify the output before files are generated:

aidf_generated_content lets you alter the content of any file before it's written. If a client needs specific phrasing in their brand.txt, or you want to inject custom data into identity.json, hook in and change it.

aidf_collected_data fires before any content is generated, giving you access to the raw data the plugin collected from WordPress. Useful if you're templating brand-specific content across multiple client sites.

The plugin works with WordPress multisite too. Each site in the network gets its own settings page and its own set of files. If you're running 20 client sites on a multisite installation, each one can have tailored AI discovery files without affecting the others.

It's also compatible with every major caching plugin: WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache. The files are generated as static files at your site root, so caching doesn't interfere.

After You Generate: Validate

Generating the files is step one. Checking they actually work is step two. We built the AI Visibility Checker specifically for this: enter your domain, and it scans for all 10 file types, validates the syntax, and gives you a score out of 100.

John Mueller from Google made an important point about machine-readable data and AI systems:

"It's just so much easier for machines to read machine-readable data instead of trying to understand your page."

John Mueller, Search Advocate, Google

That's the principle behind all of this. Your website might be perfectly clear to a human visitor. But AI systems process thousands of pages per second. They need structured data they can parse instantly. A broken JSON file or a malformed llms.txt doesn't just get ignored; it can cause the AI to misrepresent your business entirely.

The plugin includes built-in validation that checks syntax before generating. But once the files are live on your server, run them through the checker to confirm everything deployed correctly. It's free, takes 10 seconds, and catches issues like server caching serving stale files or .htaccess rules blocking access.

Your SEO Still Matters (This Doesn't Replace It)

I want to be clear about something, because there's a lot of noise online about "AI visibility replacing SEO." It doesn't. AI Overviews are changing click patterns, yes. And more people are using AI to find businesses. But Google still sends billions of clicks to websites every day.

AI discovery files and SEO aren't competing. They're complementary. Good SEO makes sure Google can find and rank your content. AI discovery files make sure ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can accurately represent your business when someone asks about you.

Think of it this way. SEO gets you found. AI discovery files get you recommended correctly. You need both.

Rand Fishkin's research at SparkToro found that AI recommendations are wildly inconsistent. There's less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT will give the same recommendation list twice. But the businesses that show up consistently across those random variations are the ones with the clearest, most structured data available. That's what these files provide.

What Happens After You Install

AI crawlers don't work on the same schedule as Google. ChatGPT's crawler (GPTBot) and Anthropic's (ClaudeBot) visit sites at their own pace. After you deploy your files, it typically takes a few days to a couple of weeks before the AI systems pick them up and start using your data.

You can speed things up. Run the AI Visibility Checker to confirm your files are accessible. Make sure your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers (the plugin's robots-ai.txt helps with this). And keep your files updated when your business details change; the plugin makes this easy since you just re-generate from the same settings page.

Over the coming months, we'll be tracking adoption data across the AI Discovery Files Directory. WordPress sites that install the plugin will be contributing to that dataset, and we'll publish updated findings as the numbers grow.

The gap between AI-visible and AI-invisible businesses is only going to widen. Billion-dollar investments are being made on the assumption that AI search will dominate how people find services. Whether that timeline is six months or two years, the businesses that prepare now will have a head start over those that wait.

Frequently Asked Questions