AI Discovery Files Plugin: Now Free on WordPress.org

The AI Discovery Files plugin just landed on WordPress.org. Free, no premium tier, no upsell. Install it, fill in the settings form with your business details, and it generates the files that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity use to understand your business.

If you've been following our coverage of AI discovery files, you'll know the problem: 99.7% of UK websites have zero AI discovery files deployed. That means when someone asks ChatGPT about your business, it's guessing. Or worse, pulling outdated information from random third-party sources.

This plugin gives you a structured way to fix that. How much detail you put in is up to you, but the more you provide, the better your files will be.

What Our Hosting Customers Keep Asking Us

We've had a steady stream of emails from WordPress hosting customers over the past few months, and they're all asking variations of the same thing. Here are some real examples (names changed, but the questions are almost word for word):

"I asked ChatGPT to recommend a plumber in Kettering and my company didn't come up. I've been trading 18 years. My competitor who's been going two minutes showed up instead. What am I doing wrong?"

David H., plumbing contractor, Northamptonshire

Nothing, David. You're not doing anything wrong with your website. The problem is that ChatGPT doesn't crawl Google results. It uses its own crawlers, and unless your site has files that tell those crawlers who you are, it's working from whatever scraps it can find. Your competitor probably doesn't have AI discovery files either; ChatGPT just happened to find a mention of them on a directory listing somewhere. The fix is giving ChatGPT your information directly, which is exactly what this plugin does.

"My daughter told me people are using AI instead of Google now. I spent £3,000 on SEO last year. Does none of that matter any more?"

Sarah T., independent retailer, Leicester

Your SEO still matters, Sarah. Google isn't going anywhere, and good SEO helps with AI Overviews too. But your daughter's right that more people are going straight to ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations. In the UK, 43% of knowledge workers now use ChatGPT regularly. Your SEO investment makes sure Google can find you. AI discovery files make sure the AI assistants can find you too. They work together; one doesn't replace the other. The plugin documentation walks through how each file contributes.

"I don't understand any of this AI stuff. I just need my WordPress website to show up when people search for what I do. Can you just sort it for me?"

James R., accountancy practice, Corby

Completely understand, James. That's half the reason this plugin exists. You don't need to understand JSON files or llms.txt specifications. The plugin gives you a settings page with a form. It pulls some basics from your WordPress site (site name, tagline, that sort of thing) and then you fill in the rest: your services, FAQs, brand voice, contact details. The more you put in, the better the generated files represent your business. If you'd rather we handle it, we also offer an AI discovery files setup service where we create and deploy the files for you. But with this plugin, most of our customers are doing it themselves.

"I tried asking Claude about my hotel and it said we had 12 rooms. We have 34. Where is it getting this from and how do I correct it?"

Margaret K., boutique hotel owner, Rutland

That's a perfect example of the problem, Margaret. Claude is pulling from whatever information it can scrape from your website, third-party booking sites, and old directory listings. Some of those sources haven't been updated in years. An identity.json file tells Claude directly: here's our name, here's what we offer, here are the facts. A faq-ai.txt lets you specifically address things like room count, facilities, and pricing. Once those files are in place and Claude's crawler picks them up, it'll use your data instead of guessing. The plugin gives you a form to enter all of this from a single settings page. You decide how much detail to include.

Every one of these questions has the same answer: your website needs AI discovery files. If you're not sure what they are or why they matter, our guide to the AI identity layer covers the full picture. And until this week, the only options were creating them manually (which most people understandably don't want to do) or paying someone to do it. Now there's a free WordPress plugin that walks you through it with a structured form.

Why a Free WordPress Plugin Changes Things

WordPress powers 42.8% of all websites globally, according to W3Techs. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Those two numbers collide in an obvious way: millions of WordPress site owners need their businesses represented accurately in AI search results, and until now, most had no easy way to make that happen.

The existing options weren't great. There's a plugin called "Website LLMs.txt" with around 30,000 installs, but it only generates a single file. AI discovery files are a family of files, each serving a different purpose. An llms.txt alone is like handing someone your business card with just your name on it. No phone number, no email, no address.

Jeremy Howard, who created the llms.txt specification at Answer.AI, put it well:

"Large language models increasingly rely on website information, but face a critical limitation: context windows are too small to handle most websites in their entirety."

Jeremy Howard, Founder, Answer.AI, Search Engine Land

That limitation is exactly why discovery files exist. They give AI systems a condensed, structured summary of who you are, what you do, and what you don't do. And now WordPress site owners can generate all of them from one settings page.

I've been working with AI discovery files since we started writing about them back in late 2025, and the biggest barrier was always the manual work. JSON syntax errors in identity.json, formatting mistakes in llms.txt, forgetting to update files when services changed. A plugin that handles all of that from inside WordPress is what the spec needed to hit mainstream adoption.

What the Plugin Actually Generates

The AI Discovery Files plugin can create up to 10 files. It pulls some basics from WordPress (site title, tagline, published pages) as a starting point, then presents you with a form to fill in the rest. Business description, services, FAQs, brand voice, contact details, developer info. The more fields you complete, the richer and more accurate your generated files will be. Skip a section and that file will be thinner. Fill everything in and you get a complete set that follows the AI discovery file specifications.

Here's what you get:

The 10 AI discovery files generated by the plugin

File	Purpose	Who Uses It
llms.txt	Structured business summary for AI crawlers	ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
llms.html	Human-readable version of the AI summary	Browsers, search engines
ai.txt	AI crawling permissions and preferences	AI bots (like robots.txt for AI)
ai.json	Machine-readable AI interaction rules	AI systems and developer tools
identity.json	Structured business identity data	AI knowledge graphs
brand.txt	Brand voice and messaging guidelines	AI content generation
faq-ai.txt	Common questions and answers about your business	AI assistants answering user queries
developer-ai.txt	Technical documentation for developer-facing AI	Coding assistants (Copilot, Claude Code)
robots-ai.txt	Fine-grained AI bot access controls	AI crawlers
llm.txt	Redirect to llms.txt (catches the common typo)	All AI systems

The plugin does auto-detect some basics from WordPress: your site name, tagline, and published page structure. But the real value comes from what you put into the form yourself. Your business description, the FAQs your customers ask, your brand tone of voice, your key services. Think of the auto-detection as a head start, not the finished product. The more detail you add, the more useful the files are to AI systems.

The Five-Minute Setup

Here's how it works in practice:

Step 1: In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New. Search "AI Discovery Files". Install and activate.

Step 2: Navigate to the new AI Discovery Files settings page. You'll see a form with sections for each file type: business identity, services, FAQs, brand voice, AI crawling permissions, and more.

Step 3: Fill in the form. The plugin pre-populates a few fields from your WordPress settings (site name, tagline), but the rest is yours to complete. Spend five minutes on the basics or half an hour filling in every section. The quality of your generated files reflects the effort you put in.

Step 4: Preview the generated files (the plugin shows syntax-highlighted previews), then click Generate Files.

The plugin also runs specification validation before generating. If something doesn't match the expected format, it tells you before creating the file. And there's conflict detection too: if you've already got a manually created llms.txt sitting in your web root, the plugin warns you rather than silently overwriting it.

You can also check your results with the AI Visibility Checker, which scans your domain and reports which files it finds, whether they're valid, and what's missing.

Why Your Hosting Setup Matters for AI Discovery Files

Here's something the plugin can't fix: if your hosting provider blocks AI crawlers at the server level, your discovery files are invisible regardless. It's like putting up a shop sign behind a locked gate.

We've seen this with several budget hosts. Security rules designed to block scrapers end up blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot too. Your files pass validation, look perfect in the preview, but no AI system can actually reach them.

On 365i's WordPress hosting, AI bots can access your discovery files without interference. The hosting platform doesn't treat AI crawlers as threats. Your files get served, your business gets represented. And because every plan includes a file manager with root-level access, you can always inspect and manage the generated files directly if you need to.

If you're on a different host, check whether AI bot user agents are blocked. The quickest test: ask ChatGPT "What does [yourdomain.com] do?" If the answer is vague, generic, or wrong, your hosting might be part of the problem.

The Adoption Numbers Tell the Story

By late 2025, BuiltWith tracked around 844,000 websites with an llms.txt file. That sounds like a lot until you consider there are over 1.1 billion websites globally. SE Ranking's analysis of 300,000 domains found only about 10% had implemented even a basic llms.txt.

Our own research across 1,000 UK business websites was even starker: 99.7% had zero AI discovery files. Not a single one. And among the 0.3% that did, most had just one or two files deployed, often with validation errors.

That gap is an opportunity. If you're a UK small business with a WordPress site, being one of the first in your sector to deploy a full set of AI discovery files puts you ahead of almost every competitor. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your industry, the business with structured AI discovery files is the one that gets cited.

Rand Fishkin from SparkToro has been tracking how AI visibility translates to real business outcomes:

"You can track brand presence frequency with statistical rigor, if you run prompts enough times."

Rand Fishkin, Co-founder, SparkToro, Near Media Podcast

He's right, and that's what makes this measurable. Before you install the plugin, ask ChatGPT about your business. Screenshot the answer. Install the plugin, give it a few weeks for AI systems to crawl your new files, then ask again. The difference is usually obvious.

Essential, Recommended, or Complete?

The plugin organises its 10 files into three tiers, and you don't have to deploy all of them at once:

Essential (start here): llms.txt, identity.json, and ai.txt. These three cover the basics: who you are, what you do, and how AI should interact with your site. If you do nothing else, deploy these.

Recommended (for most businesses): Add faq-ai.txt, brand.txt, and ai.json. The FAQ file is particularly useful because it lets you proactively answer the questions people ask AI about your industry. If someone asks ChatGPT "Is [your business] reliable?", your faq-ai.txt can provide the answer directly.

Complete (full coverage): All 10 files, including developer-ai.txt for coding assistants and robots-ai.txt for granular access controls. If you've got an API, developer documentation, or technical products, the complete set is worth deploying. The plugin documentation page explains each tier in detail.

No Lock-In, No Catch

One thing worth mentioning: the plugin is GPL v2 and free with no premium version planned. Disable it and your files stop being served, but nothing gets deleted. Your WordPress data stays untouched.

There are also developer hooks if you want to customise the output. The aidf_generated_content and aidf_collected_data filters let you modify what goes into any file before it's generated. If you're an agency managing multiple client sites, that's useful for templating brand-specific content across sites.

The plugin needs WordPress 6.2 or higher and PHP 8.0+, which shouldn't be an issue for anyone on a modern host. It's been tested up to WordPress 6.9.

If you've been meaning to sort out your site's AI visibility but kept putting it off because it felt too technical, this is the nudge. Zero cost, a structured form that guides you through what to provide, and the more detail you put in, the better AI systems understand your business.

And once you've generated your files, validate them. Check they actually work. Because deploying files that AI systems can't read is worse than having none at all.

Frequently Asked Questions