Frequently asked questions

GEO is the practice of making a website legible and citable to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — controlling crawler access, publishing structured data and llms.txt, and structuring content so it can be extracted and quoted accurately. It's the AI-era counterpart to traditional SEO, aimed at a different kind of "search" result.

Yes, if AI visibility matters to you — GEO and SEO are complementary, not the same discipline. SEO optimizes for ranking in traditional search results; GEO optimizes for being found, read, and cited by AI models, which involves different mechanics like crawler access control, llms.txt, and structured data coverage that most SEO plugins don't address.

CrawlPod isn't designed as a Google-ranking tool, and we don't claim it moves rankings. Some overlap exists in practice — clean structure, valid schema, and crawlable pages tend to help both Google and AI systems — but its purpose is AI visibility, not search-engine rank.

No. Cloaking means showing search engines and users substantively different content to manipulate rankings, without disclosure. LLM A/B Testing discloses itself via transparency headers and HTML comments, Google and Bing always see the original, unmodified page, and only presentation-level details are varied for AI crawlers — never substantive claims. See LLM A/B Testing for the full mechanics.

AI crawler access control for 16 known crawlers, automatic llms.txt generation, crawler analytics (including pages no AI bot has visited yet), and a 7-check visibility score. It's permanently free on wordpress.org, not a trial.

Pro ($39/year) adds the full 9-point AI Readiness Audit and bulk site-wide scanning with scheduling, scan history, and diffing between runs.

Business ($79/year, our most popular tier) adds everything in Pro plus the AI Hallucination Firewall, Competitor Poisoning Alerts, the CrawlPod Verified Badge, Dynamic AI Promo Codes, and an AI Share of Voice report.

Ultra ($149/year) adds everything in Business plus Vector-Gap Analysis, a Pre-Flight AI Sandbox, an MCP Server auto-generator, and LLM A/B Testing.

All paid plans are billed annually and processed through Freemius. Every paid tier includes a 14-day free trial, and no credit card is required to start the trial.

Yes, at any time, from your Freemius account (linked from your receipt email) or from CrawlPod's license settings in your WordPress admin. Upgrades apply immediately; downgrades and cancellations take effect at the end of your current billing period.

No. CrawlPod is entirely dashboard-driven from your WordPress admin — installing the plugin, toggling crawler access, generating llms.txt, and reading audit results all happen through the UI, with no manual file editing required.

CrawlPod is built to run alongside common caching and SEO plugins rather than replace them. It controls AI crawler access and audits your markup, but doesn't touch your existing SEO plugin's configuration.

llms.txt is a plain-text file that gives AI models a structured index of your site's key content. It isn't required by any AI system, but it's a low-cost addition that CrawlPod's free plugin generates and keeps current for you automatically. See the llms.txt setup guide for details.

CrawlPod's free tier tracks 16 known AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, and lets you allow or block each one individually with analytics on which have actually visited your site. See robots.txt for AI crawlers for the full list and how blocking works.

It's a Pro-tier audit that checks structural and technical factors affecting whether AI systems can read, understand, and cite your pages — including structured-data coverage and validity, among 8 other checks. See the AI Readiness Audit for the complete list.

Yes. CrawlPod's core features work on any WordPress site regardless of whether WooCommerce is installed. One Ultra-tier feature, the MCP Server, is specifically built for WooCommerce stores.

Every paid plan includes a 14-day free trial with no credit card required to start it, which is meant to cover evaluating the full feature set before you're charged. We don't offer a separate refund guarantee beyond that trial window.

A current WordPress install is all that's needed for the free plugin and most paid features. The one exception is Ultra's MCP Server, which requires WooCommerce to be installed and active since it's built specifically for store data.