Why Your WordPress Site Isn’t Being Cited by AI (and How to Fix It)
- Seven common reasons: missing/broken schema, vague entities, stale
dateModified, no named author, paragraphs over 150 words, nollms.txt, slow TTFB. - Most sites have 4–6 of these active simultaneously.
- The fix pass takes one working day on a 100-post blog.
If you’ve been publishing solid content for a year and ChatGPT still doesn’t know you exist, the problem is almost never your writing. It’s one of seven technical signals AI engines use to decide whether your site is worth citing. Here they are, in order of how often we see them broken.
1. You have no (or broken) Article schema
By far the most common issue. The post is fine — but without Article schema, AI engines can’t reliably identify it as an article. Fix: install GEO Suite, Yoast, or Rank Math; validate every template with Google’s Rich Results Test.
2. Your subjects are vague
“Our platform”, “the product”, “this tool” — AI engines can’t resolve vague subjects to entities, so they don’t quote the passages that contain them. Fix: name every subject. Say “GEO Suite” not “our plugin.”
3. dateModified is stale or missing
A post from 2022 loses to the same content re-published in 2026. Fix: refresh and re-publish evergreen posts on a quarterly cadence. Make sure dateModified in Article schema updates automatically.
4. You have no named author
Anonymous posts get cited at a fraction of the rate of bylined posts. Fix: add a named author with sameAs to Wikidata or LinkedIn.
5. Your paragraphs are too long
AI engines extract passages. Long paragraphs get chopped awkwardly or skipped. Fix: max 120 words per paragraph. Lead each one with the most quotable sentence.
6. You have no llms.txt
Not mandatory, but increasingly expected. Anthropic and Perplexity already read it. Fix: deploy llms.txt — five minutes with GEO Suite, thirty minutes manually.
7. Your TTFB is slow
If first-byte time exceeds 800ms, retrieval crawlers often timeout before your content loads. Fix: cache plugin, CDN, PHP 8.2+, and a host that can handle sub-400ms TTFB.
GEO Suite scans your site and surfaces every one of these issues in a single audit report.
GEO Suite is the WordPress plugin that ships auto-schema, llms.txt, entity markup, citation tracking, and Claude/Perplexity/ChatGPT-friendly content signals in one install. Skip the 40-hour DIY setup.
Rather not DIY? If you want the audit + full fix pass handled in one engagement — Segovia Digital handles GEO implementation end-to-end →
The one-day fix pass
Most WordPress sites have four or more of these active simultaneously. A single focused day — schema pass, entity rewrite pass, author bio pass, llms.txt deploy — typically lifts citation rate by 3–5x within 60 days. See our 340% case study for the detailed methodology.
FAQs
How do I tell if my site is being cited at all?
Run sample queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude using natural language phrases your content targets. Check whether you appear as a source. Automate with GEO Suite’s citation tracker.
Will fixing these guarantee citations?
No single change guarantees anything. But fixing all seven produces a measurable lift on every site we’ve audited since mid-2024.