Install & setup

Install Acid AEO like any WordPress plugin, activate it, and the setup wizard opens by itself.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.4 or newer and PHP 8.0 or newer.
• A user with the manage_options capability to configure the plugin.
• Pretty permalinks. The files are served through WordPress rewrite rules, so plain permalinks work only through a query variable.

From the WordPress.org directory

1. In the admin, go to Plugins → Add New.
2. Search for "Acid AEO".
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.

From a zip

Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip and activate it. Or unzip it so the folder is wp-content/plugins/acid-aeo/ and activate it from the Plugins screen.

With WP-CLI

wp plugin install acid-aeo --activate

What happens on activation

For the site being activated, the plugin:

1. Generates the IndexNow key, if there is none yet.
2. Sets an expiry date one year ahead for security.txt, if there is none yet.
3. Creates its events table, used for citation tracking.
4. Schedules one daily task.
5. Marks the rewrite rules to be flushed once.
6. Sets a one-minute flag that sends you to the setup wizard.

On a network-wide activation these steps run for every existing site, and again for each site created later. The redirect to the wizard is skipped on bulk activation (several plugins at once), in network admin, for users without manage_options, and once the wizard has been completed.

Nothing is written to disk by default. The files are virtual: WordPress produces them on request.

Check that it works

Open these on your site:

• /llms.txt
• /robots.txt
• /.well-known/security.txt

If one returns a 404, go to Settings → Permalinks and press Save Changes once to refresh the rewrite rules. A real file with the same name in the webroot is served instead of the generated one, and the audit reports it for robots.txt and llms.txt. More in Troubleshooting.

Updating

Updates arrive on the normal Plugins and Dashboard → Updates screens. Settings are kept, and the wizard does not open again.

Uninstalling

Deactivating removes the scheduled tasks and the plugin's rewrite rules. It keeps your settings, your data, and any physical files the plugin wrote, on purpose: deactivation is often a test, and a site whose CDN serves /llms.txt from disk should not lose it for that.

Deleting the plugin runs uninstall.php, which removes:

• the plugin's settings and its other stored options, such as the IndexNow queue and log;
• the citation events table;
• its scheduled tasks and its cached transients;
• the per-post meta it added (summary, FAQ, exclusions, schema type, licence, credit, creator, and the hide-updated flag);
• the user meta it added to profiles;
• physical files in the webroot, but only those carrying the plugin's own marker. Files you wrote yourself are never touched.

To keep everything for a later reinstall, tick Keep my data when the plugin is deleted under Acid AEO → Settings → Advanced before deleting. It is off by default. With it on, the settings, table and meta stay, and the physical files and user meta stay too; WordPress's rewrite rules are still reset.