Visibility – Lightweight SEO for Search and AI

FAQ

Does Visibility replace Yoast / Rank Math / AIOSEO?

For most sites, yes. Visibility covers what 90% of sites actually need: titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph, schema, robots directives, redirect management and sitemap control — and it imports your per-post data from those plugins in one click. It does not include keyword analysis or content scoring. If you don’t need those, Visibility is a much lighter alternative. If you do, stick with your current SEO plugin — Visibility isn’t meant to run alongside.

How do I migrate from another SEO plugin?

Install and activate Visibility. If data from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, Slim SEO or SureRank exists in your database (the suite can be active or already deactivated), the Tools tab shows an import card with a per-field breakdown: titles, meta descriptions and robots overrides on posts and on taxonomy terms, plus canonical URLs, Open Graph images, social titles and descriptions, the default social image, the per-content-type schema type and the webmaster tools verification codes. Your existing 301, 302, 307 and 410 redirects come over too, from Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress and the Redirection plugin. One click copies it all into Visibility without touching the source plugin, skipping anything you already set here and any value built from the suite’s template variables (%%title%%, %title%, #post_title, {{ title }}) — Visibility generates those from your real content. Each suite imports what it actually stores; the per-field breakdown always shows exactly what was found before you import, and the import is non-destructive and idempotent: your existing Visibility values win and re-running never duplicates. Review a few entries, then deactivate the suite. Old sitemap URLs (sitemap.xml, post-sitemap.xml…) keep working through a 301 redirect to the native /wp-sitemap.xml.

I used Native SEO Meta Tags, NoIndexer or Sitemap Customizer. How do I migrate?

Install and activate Visibility. If it finds data from any of those plugins, the Tools tab shows an import card with a per-plugin breakdown and an «Import now» button (and Overview points you there). The import is non-destructive (it copies, never deletes) and your existing Visibility values win on any conflict, so you can run it safely. Once you’ve imported and checked everything, deactivate the old plugins.

Are there any database tables?

No. Visibility stores its settings in a single WordPress option and uses native post, term and user meta tables for per-content overrides. Deleting the plugin removes the option; per-content overrides remain so reinstalling does not lose your work.

Can I disable individual modules?

Yes. The Overview tab lets you toggle Discover (meta tags), Indexing (robots), Sitemaps and Redirects independently. You can run only what you need.

How does Visibility help with AI (AEO / GEO)?

It emits the signals AI search and assistants can read about your site: Site Identity JSON-LD (who is behind it), llms.txt and llms-full.txt (a Markdown index of your content, with taxonomy sections and WooCommerce-aware data), a clean Markdown version of every page at its .md URL, and a robots.txt editor to allow or block AI crawlers by name. No plugin can guarantee a citation, but Visibility makes your content easy for AI systems to find, read and attribute, and these are served on the fly with no extra files or cron. The companion plugin VigIA can then measure which AI crawlers actually visit.

Does it work with custom post types and custom taxonomies?

Yes. All public post types and taxonomies are supported — including WooCommerce product categories, tags and attributes (the latter requires «Enable Archives?» in the WooCommerce attribute settings).

Can I preview how my page will look on Google, social networks and AI answers?

Yes. The Visibility panel — in the Block Editor sidebar and in the Classic Editor meta box — includes a live preview with three views: your Google result snippet, your shared social card and an AI Overview citing your page. It updates as you type, following the exact fallback chains the plugin emits (post title, excerpt, featured image, site fallbacks). It is an honest render of what goes into your HTML, not a score: the final appearance always depends on each platform.

How do I set noindex on a single post?

In the Block Editor, open the Visibility panel in the post sidebar and tick the noindex toggle. In the Classic Editor, the same toggle is in the Visibility meta box. You can also use Quick Edit or Bulk Actions from the post list.

Does my robots.txt always work, even on a subdirectory install?

Yes, and this is an SEO safeguard worth knowing about. WordPress only serves its virtual /robots.txt on root installs once the rewrite rules have been flushed; on a subdirectory install, or when the rules go stale, /robots.txt can return a 404 while the same directives still answer at /?robots=1 — so crawlers asking for the canonical /robots.txt get nothing. Visibility takes ownership of the endpoint: it serves /robots.txt itself when there is no physical file (independent of the rewrite rules, so it works on any install), and when another plugin writes a physical robots.txt that the web server would serve instead, it merges its own directives into that file in a BEGIN/END block, leaving every other block untouched, so its rules prevail there too. It also 301-redirects WordPress’s internal /?robots=1 to /robots.txt. The result is a single canonical /robots.txt that always loads your AI-crawler and indexing rules, even behind a static file.

Does Visibility work on WordPress Multisite?

Yes, and each site keeps its own rules. Every site in the network has its own Visibility settings, so on a subdomain or mapped-domain network each one serves its own /robots.txt and /llms.txt from its own directives, with nothing to wire up by hand — something WordPress does not do on its own and most SEO plugins leave as a single global file. This matters because a physical robots.txt or llms.txt in the site root is one file shared by the whole install: Visibility writes it only where it genuinely belongs — a single-site install, or the main site of a subdirectory network — so one site can never overwrite another’s rules, and everywhere else the always-served virtual endpoints answer per site. On a subdirectory network (every site under one domain) the robots.txt standard allows only one file at the domain root, owned by the main site, and the Discover tab makes that clear wherever the physical-file option does not apply. Activate Visibility per site or network-activate it; either way, no site clobbers another.

Where does Visibility store per-post overrides?

In standard WordPress post meta (_native_aeo_pack_* keys). Term overrides go to term meta, user social URLs to user meta. Nothing leaves the standard WordPress tables.

Can I copy my configuration to another site?

Yes. The Tools tab exports every Visibility setting plus the per-entry and per-term values (meta titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, social overrides, schema types, robots flags) as a single JSON file, and imports it back on another site. Content is matched by slug, not by database ID, so it works between sites that were never clones: staging to production, or a starter configuration across several sites. On import you choose whether the file only fills in what is empty (the default, safe on a site that already has its own values) or replaces what is there. Everything goes through the same validation as the settings screen, only known keys are read, and nothing is ever created: values land on content that already exists, and the result tells you how many entries were not found. Redirects are not in the file because they have their own CSV export on the Redirects tab, and author profile fields stay out because they belong to each user account.

How do I know which content has gone stale?

Content freshness is the AEO signal with the strongest evidence behind it: pages updated in the last month get cited noticeably more often by AI assistants. With the threshold set in the Discover tab (90 days by default), your content lists get a «Not updated in 90 days» filter link with a count, and a sortable Last updated column. That is all it does: no score, no traffic light, no «SEO health» number, because which article deserves a rewrite is an editorial call. Set the threshold to 0 to leave your list tables untouched.

Can I clean up my WooCommerce URLs?

Yes, including the parts WooCommerce itself refuses to do. In the Indexing tab you can remove the base of each taxonomy independently, so a store can drop /product-category/, /product-tag/ and /brand/ while keeping /category/ on its blog, which the single toggle of earlier versions did not allow. And you can choose a product URL structure WooCommerce blocks on its own permalinks screen: the product slug alone (/my-product/), the category and the slug (/t-shirts/my-product/), or the full category path (/clothing/t-shirts/my-product/). WooCommerce puts the /product/ base back whenever you empty it and forces a base in front of a category structure, which is why those three need a plugin.

Old URLs are 301-redirected to the new ones, and so is any other combination that still resolves (a leftover base, a category the product no longer belongs to), so a product never ends up reachable at two URLs. The redirects are included: no premium tier for them. If you are running Premmerce Permalink Manager, Visibility detects it, tells you in the Indexing tab that both plugins are rewriting the same URLs, and takes precedence (its filters run last). Import its structure from the Tools tab first, check your product URLs, and then you can deactivate it, premium included. Two honest notes. Whatever already exists at a path wins, so a page or a term keeps its URL and the product stays on the one WooCommerce gave it. And a base-less taxonomy URL costs one rewrite rule per term, five counting feeds and pagination, so the settings screen tells you how many rules your selection adds before you commit to it: fine for a blog or a normal shop, worth a thought on a store with thousands of attribute terms.

Does Visibility generate FAQ structured data?

Yes, from the content you already have. Switch on JSON-LD: FAQPage in the Discover tab and Visibility reads the native Details and Accordion blocks in your entries, taking the question from the block heading and the answer from its content, and emits FAQPage in the same JSON-LD block as the rest of the schema. There is no separate builder or duplicate fields to fill in, so the markup can only ever describe Q&A that is genuinely visible on the page. It is off by default on purpose: a Details block is not always a question («Show technical details»), and describing something that is not a FAQ is worse than not describing it. Honest expectation: this helps AI assistants pick up your Q&A structure. It does not bring back Google’s FAQ rich results, which were retired in 2023.

Is there an API for plugins and themes?

Yes, and it stays stable. Read the robots state Visibility resolved with Native_AEO_Pack_Frontend_Robots::is_noindex( $post_id ), is_nofollow( $post_id ), is_term_noindex( $term_id, $taxonomy ) and is_term_nofollow( $term_id, $taxonomy ); read any setting with Native_AEO_Pack_Settings::get( $group, $key, $default ); and check the AI-crawler rules with Native_AEO_Pack_Settings::is_robots_ai_blocking() and get_robots_ai_agents(), which is how the companion plugin VigIA reads them.

To change what is emitted, four filters:

• native_aeo_pack_schema_graph ($graph, $context, $object) — the JSON-LD nodes before they are printed. $context is article, person or identity. Add, edit or drop nodes; return an empty array to print nothing.
• native_aeo_pack_meta_description ($description) — the resolved description, after the whole fallback chain. It feeds the meta tag, og:description, the Twitter card, the Article node and the preview alike.
• native_aeo_pack_og_image ($image, $post) — the image chosen for a singular, after the per-post, featured, WooCommerce, inline and site-fallback chain.
• native_aeo_pack_schema_faq_pairs ($pairs, $post) — the question/answer pairs read from the blocks, before they become FAQPage. Return an empty array to skip it on a page where Details blocks are not questions.