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AEOSearch measures how ready your site is for answer engines — the assistants people now ask instead of typing a search. The measuring happens on the AEOSearch platform. This plugin asks for the result and shows it to you.

So every number on a readiness or citation screen is the platform's number, printed as it arrived. The plugin does no arithmetic on it. If a figure looks wrong, the platform is where to argue with it, not this screen.

One part is local and needs no account at all: the writing lens. It reads a page on this server and shows its own meters for the title, the description and the readability. Those are computed here, and they are the only scores that are.

Two things this plugin will not do: promise you a citation, and count a measurement that failed as a zero. Both are refusals, and both cost us numbers that would look better.

Open AEOSearch → Connection. Paste the key you were given, save it, then tick the consent box below. Both steps, or nothing is sent.

A key is bound to one exact host. This site's host is the address WordPress publishes, lowercased, with a trailing dot and a leading www. removed — and the Connection screen prints the exact string your key has to be registered for.

When the platform answers domain_not_bound, the key is real but was issued for a different host. A staging site and a production site are different hosts; so are example.com and shop.example.com. Ask for a key issued for the host the Connection screen shows.

Once saved, the key is shown back to you as its last four characters only, and Disconnect on the same screen deletes it.

Installing sends nothing. Activating sends nothing. The first request leaves only after you tick consent — and the consent text is the whole list, not a summary of it.

Ticked, this can travel: your site address, your site key, and audit requests, including one automatic re-check a day for as long as the site stays connected. The URL of any page you ask to analyze. If you switch on analyze-after-publishing, the URL of each post as it goes live.

Three things travel only on a specific click. Analyzing an unpublished post sends that post's title and text, because nobody can fetch a draft from outside. Asking for a suggested title or description sends that page's title, the opening of its text and its headings, and AEOSearch passes them to Anthropic, which writes the suggestion. Starting a citation scorecard sends the brand name, category, buyer description, and any aliases and competitors you typed into that form.

The text is versioned. When a release adds anything to that list, the box comes back and asks again — consent given to an older text never covers a newer one. Disconnecting stops all of it.

On the Connection screen, under Actions, press Run readiness audit. The platform fetches your site the way an answer engine would, then checks it.

The screen goes into a running state and reloads itself after the interval the platform names — usually about a minute. You can walk away; the finished result is stored, so coming back later shows the same run rather than starting another.

After the first one, a re-check runs once a day on its own for as long as the site stays connected. That is the automatic request the consent text names.

A refused start says why in one sentence. cadence means the platform already audited this site inside the current window, and the refusal names when the next run is allowed.

The result is a tally and a ledger. The tally counts the checks that passed, warned and failed. The ledger lists every check by name with its status beside it.

There is a fourth status, and it is the one worth learning: could not measure. A check that did not run is listed under that label and counted as nothing at all — not a pass, not a fail. The screen says how many there were, in words.

Which means the passes and the fails do not always add up to the number of checks. That is the honest arithmetic, not a rounding bug: an unmeasured check leaves the denominator rather than entering it as a zero.

A check whose name is a link has a proposed fix waiting on the Fixes screen — follow it to read the exact bytes before anything is applied. A check with no link had no fix in this audit.

Failed means the run did not produce a result. It does not mean your site failed anything.

The screen names the cause in a sentence and offers somewhere to go, because a red line with nothing to click is not a state — it is a dead end.

The usual causes are unglamorous. The platform could not resolve this site's public address, which is what domain_invalid means and what happens on localhost or an intranet host. The key was rejected or revoked. The platform did not answer in time.

A failed run never overwrites the stored result of an earlier successful one. It does replace it on screen: the dashboard shows the newest run, so while the newest run is the failure, the older ledger is not drawn. It comes back the next time an audit completes.