Yoast SEO runs on more than 10 million WordPress sites, according to its plugin listing. That reach gives its defaults real weight in what AI crawlers find across the web. Yoast SEO now ships AI search features in three places: the files crawlers read, the bots you let in and a paid tracker for AI answers.
Yoast is an implementation layer with a light tracker attached. The plugin shapes schema, llms.txt and crawler rules. AI Brand Insights runs up to five brand questions a week on four AI platforms.
What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is an SEO plugin for WordPress, with a separate app for Shopify. The free version covers XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, a Schema.org graph, breadcrumbs and llms.txt management. Premium adds more schema types, AI crawler toggles and AI drafts for titles and meta descriptions.
Yoast SEO AI+ bundles the plugin with AI Brand Insights, the tracking product. WooCommerce SEO covers stores built on WordPress.
| Feature | What it does for AI search | Where it’s included |
|---|
| Schema.org graph | Describes your organization, pages, articles and products | Free; Premium adds types |
| llms.txt | Generates and refreshes a file pointing AI tools to your main pages | Free, on WordPress and Shopify |
| Schema Aggregation | Serves the whole schema graph from one endpoint | Opt-in, in Yoast SEO and paid plans |
| Block unwanted bots | Writes robots.txt rules for AI crawlers | Premium for AI bots |
| AI Brand Insights | Weekly brand scans on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude | Yoast SEO AI+ |
What is Yoast AI Brand Insights?
AI Brand Insights checks how AI platforms describe your brand. You enter your brand, domain, industry, location and competitors. Then you add up to five brand questions or accept AI-suggested ones.
Scans run weekly, and Yoast emails you when each analysis is ready. Reports cover mentions, sentiment, citation sources and competitive positioning. The AI Visibility Index rolls those into one score that moves week to week.
Coverage spans ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, which Yoast added on May 28, 2026. The tool runs in your MyYoast account and works for any site, on any CMS. Agencies add one subscription per client brand.
Is Yoast AI Brand Insights enough to track AI visibility?
For a single brand that wants a weekly pulse, it’s a reasonable start. Five questions a week give you a trend line and a first look at which sources AI cites.
It wasn’t built for large programs. There’s no Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode or Microsoft Copilot coverage, and five questions can’t represent a category. Brands and agencies tracking many products, countries and languages need far bigger prompt sets.
For scale, our own dataset for one month held 103,427 AI answers and 746,702 citations. Source: Ansvisor tracking data, September 15 to October 14, 2026.
Check what the score blends. The AI Visibility Index combines mentions, sentiment, citations and positioning. When it moves, look at each part before you act.
How does Yoast generate llms.txt?
Yoast’s llms.txt feature creates the file with one click and refreshes it automatically. By default, Yoast picks the content itself. You can switch to manual mode, choose the pages yourself and preview the file before it goes live.
It’s free in every Yoast product, including the Shopify app. A generated file follows the usual llms.txt layout:
# Example Outdoor Co.
> Outdoor gear for hikers and climbers.
## Key pages
- [Waterproof jackets](https://example.com/jackets): Buying guide and specs
- [Returns](https://example.com/returns): 60-day return policy
Keep the payoff in proportion. The format is a proposal, and AI engines haven’t confirmed they read it. It costs nothing in Yoast, so most sites can switch it on and move on.
What is Yoast Schema Aggregation?
Schema Aggregation takes the schema graph Yoast already builds and serves it as one complete response from a dedicated endpoint. Duplicate entities merge into a single node, so an author or product appears once.
It’s opt-in, with a single toggle, and included in Yoast SEO, Premium, WooCommerce SEO and AI+. Yoast pairs it with NLWeb, Microsoft’s open protocol for conversational interfaces on websites.
The idea is that an agent can read your whole entity map in one request. Whether AI engines use such endpoints is still an open question. Clean schema markup on each page remains the safer bet.
Can Yoast block AI crawlers?
Yes, in Premium. Under Settings, Advanced, then Crawl optimization, the "Block unwanted bots" toggles write robots.txt rules for you. The free version can only block Google AdsBot.
Premium can block Google-Extended, OpenAI’s GPTBot and Common Crawl’s CCBot. Yoast itself warns that blocking AI bots may hide your site from some online searches.
Know what each bot does before you flip a toggle. GPTBot collects training data, while OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for ChatGPT search. Google-Extended controls Gemini training and grounding, not Google Search.
Does Yoast help content rank in ChatGPT?
Indirectly. Yoast keeps pages indexable, structured and easy to parse, which every AI engine needs. Premium’s AI drafts for titles and meta descriptions save time across thousands of pages, and nothing saves until you approve it.
AI answers quote page content, though, not meta tags. The passages that get cited are direct answers, specific numbers and clear comparisons. Our guide to optimizing content for ChatGPT covers what to change on the page.
Yoast SEO vs Ansvisor
| Yoast SEO | Ansvisor |
|---|
| Core job | On-site SEO plugin for WordPress and Shopify | AI search tracking and analytics for any site |
| AI engines tracked | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity; Claude on Enterprise |
| Prompt volume | Up to five brand questions, weekly | Prompt sets sized by plan, across countries and languages |
| Reporting | One AI Visibility Index | Mentions and citations reported separately per prompt |
| Getting started | Free plugin; tracking in Yoast SEO AI+ | 14-day free trial; open source and self-hostable |
The two barely overlap. Yoast handles the site, and Ansvisor tracks what AI engines do with it. A typical loop looks like this:
Track prompts in Ansvisor → Find pages that lose citations → Fix copy, schema and crawler rules with Yoast → Republish → Track again
- Track category and comparison prompts for each market you sell in.
- Open the prompts where competitors are cited and you aren’t, and list the URLs that win.
- Fix your matching page: answer first, add specs and tables, then check its schema in Yoast.
- Confirm the page is in llms.txt and that no bot toggle blocks the crawlers you need.
- Check citations again after the next few tracking runs.
How Ansvisor helps
Ansvisor’s Answer Engine Insights runs your prompts across six AI platforms, with Claude on Enterprise plans. It shows which brands each answer names, which URLs it cites and where competitors win. Site Audit then checks the schema, llms.txt and crawler access that Yoast manages. Start a 14-day free trial.
