Google is no longer the homepage of the internet.
For most of our careers, “showing up online” meant ranking on Google. That’s not the main source of discovery anymore. The area to focus on now is whether your site (or your client’s) shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overview. It’s a different set of problems with a different answer than traditional SEO. Most WordPress teams are still optimizing for a Google-only world, so let me show you how to optimize for the Agentic era.
This talk is a wake-up call paired with a working playbook for AEO and GEO (Answer Engine and Generative Engine Optimization), the disciplines now sitting alongside SEO. We’ll look at what actually changed: how discovery fragmented across answer engines, what citation data says about known versus obscure brands, and why robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, and the shape of your content are now consequential business decisions, not defaults you can inherit from a plugin.
The talk will be practical and WordPress-focused. I’ll show how this maps onto the WP stack: structured data through blocks and schema, an llms.txt strategy for your site, content shaped for citation in Gutenberg, and where the Abilities API, MCP, and AI connectors fit into a site built to be read by machines as well as people. I’ll share live scan data from my own tooling and an anonymized client case where AEO work moved a real number.
I’m not an SEO person by trade. I’m a WordPress and PHP developer who got pulled into this through client work. You’ll leave with a vocabulary, a pile of evidence, and a playbook you can take to your team or clients: audit, decide who you allow, shape your content for citation, and measure what’s working.