LLM Override

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimizes for Google’s crawler — a bot that ranks pages and
shows links. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes for AI models like ChatGPT, Claude,
and Perplexity — systems that synthesize answers and cite sources. The key difference: Google
shows your page. AI answers replace your page with a summary. If that summary is wrong, your
brand is damaged. GEO is how you control what that summary says.

A sitemap tells an AI where your URLs are. M2M interception controls what an AI receives when
it visits those URLs. LLM Override sits between the AI crawler and your WordPress theme: when
a bot requests your page, instead of getting raw HTML full of navigation, ads, and JavaScript,
it receives clean, structured Markdown with your canonical facts already embedded. A sitemap
is a phone book. M2M interception is the actual conversation.

Nothing. Human visitors always receive your normal WordPress theme. The M2M layer is invisible:
it only activates when the ?view=raw parameter is present, which only AI crawlers
following the <link rel="alternate"> standard will use. There is no redirect, no separate
URL, no parallel site to maintain.

llms.txt is a directory: a list of your important URLs. It helps AI crawlers discover your
content. LLM Override does that (via the dynamic /llms.txt endpoint) — and then goes further:
when the AI crawler visits each of those URLs, it receives a semantically structured Markdown
payload, not raw HTML. The /llms.txt file is the door. M2M interception controls what
happens inside the room.

No, and this is intentional. LLM Override generates /llms.txt dynamically on every request.
This means it always reflects your latest published content — no stale data, no manual
regeneration needed after publishing new pages. It also means it works on any hosting
environment, including read-only filesystems and managed platforms, without requiring
write access to your server root.

Yes. Because LLM Override never writes files directly to the filesystem, it is compatible
with any hosting environment, including those with read-only or restricted filesystem access.
The plugin uses only the WordPress Options API, Transients API, and WordPress Rewrite Rules —
the standard APIs that work everywhere.

The Site Manifest is a block of verifiable organization facts — your canonical brand
description, key figures, certifications — that appears in your /llms.txt site manifest.
Every time ChatGPT or Claude reads your site’s /llms.txt, it receives this factual summary
as context. Write only verifiable facts that match your visible web content.

YAML frontmatter is structured metadata placed at the very beginning of a Markdown document,
in a format that AI models are specifically trained to parse and prioritize. LLM Override
automatically adds frontmatter to every payload containing: your page title, canonical URL,
last modified date, and your Corporate Manifest. This metadata is processed before the
body content — giving you context control at the highest-priority position in the document.

LLM Override automatically reads noindex and nofollow rules from Yoast SEO, Rank Math,
SEOPress, and AIOSEO. Any page you have excluded from search engines in those plugins will
also be excluded from your /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt manifests automatically — with
zero manual configuration. The integration is implemented at the database level (direct
wp_postmeta query) for maximum performance and zero dependency on those plugins being active.

/llms.txt is a concise, standard-compliant manifest: titles, URLs, and M2M links for all
your public content. /llms-full.txt is an extended version that includes a content snippet
for each URL (truncated to 500 characters, sanitized Markdown) — useful for documentation
sites, knowledge bases, or any site where giving AI crawlers an immediate content preview
improves retrieval accuracy.

It adds a button to the WordPress Admin Bar visible only to administrators. On any singular
post or page, clicking it opens the raw M2M Markdown payload exactly as an AI crawler would
receive it — including your YAML frontmatter and Site
Manifest. It is an empirical verification tool: see exactly what you are serving,
before you assume.

LLM Override includes a dictionary of 58 known AI crawlers across 4 behavioral categories:
Training bots (harvesting data for model training), Query bots (real-time RAG requests),
Discovery bots (sitemap and manifest crawlers), and Scraping bots (unclassified AI traffic).
Detection uses User-Agent matching on the template_redirect hook. Detected bots are
automatically served Markdown without requiring the ?view=raw parameter.

No. LLM Override adds X-Robots-Tag: noindex to all M2M Markdown responses, which tells
Googlebot and Bing to ignore them. Your standard HTML pages remain exactly as they are and
continue to be indexed normally. LLM Override operates on a completely separate delivery
channel that search engine crawlers do not follow.

No. LLM Override detects active caching layers (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache,
FastCGI, Varnish, Cloudflare) and programmatically disables them exclusively for M2M
requests. Your human visitors continue to be served cached pages normally. Only bot
requests via the M2M channel bypass cache — by design, to guarantee fresh content delivery.

LLM Override exposes 14 documented hooks:

Filters:
llm_override_markdown_output — modify the final Markdown string before delivery
llm_override_yaml_frontmatter — modify or extend the YAML frontmatter array
llm_override_pre_convert_content — replace the raw HTML before conversion (used by Pro AI Copilot)
llm_override_llmstxt_entries — filter the URL list before /llms.txt is rendered
llm_override_excluded_post_ids — add custom exclusion logic for manifests
llm_override_bot_user_agents — extend the bot detection dictionary

Actions:
llm_override_bot_detected — fires when a known bot is intercepted (used by Shadow Analytics)
llm_override_before_markdown_output — fires before Markdown is echoed
llm_override_after_markdown_output — fires after delivery
llm_override_llmstxt_generated — fires after /llms.txt is regenerated
llm_override_settings_after_general — extend the settings panel (used by Pro)
llm_override_dashboard_after_kpis — extend the dashboard (used by Pro)

Yes. Shadow Analytics Lite stores bot activity logs, but never in association with identifiable
user data. IP addresses detected during bot interception are hashed using a daily-rotating
salt before storage — making them non-reversible and non-identifiable. No data is transmitted
to external servers in the free version.

No. The free version is entirely self-contained. It intercepts incoming AI crawler requests
and serves them Markdown — it does not make any outgoing API calls to any AI service.
The Pro version optionally connects to AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenRouter)
via keys you provide (BYOK — Bring Your Own Key). Those connections are explicitly initiated
by you, and only transmit the content of the specific page being processed.