Why we build for LLMs, not just Google

This is what’s being called GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — and it sits alongside, not instead of, traditional SEO. We think it’s now a core part of building a website properly, not an add-on.

Why most WordPress sites aren’t ready for this

Most WordPress sites are built for a human scrolling and a search engine crawling — not for a language model trying to understand a site’s content, structure and credibility in one pass.

The usual culprits:

• No structured data, or shallow schema bolted on by a generic plugin, giving AI crawlers no clean signal about who you are, what you offer, or how your content is organised
• Bloated themes and page builders, producing markup so noisy it’s harder for any crawler — human-facing or AI — to extract what actually matters
• No llms.txt — a simple, emerging standard that gives AI systems a direct, structured summary of a site, similar in spirit to robots.txt but written for language models rather than search bots

None of this is exotic. It’s mostly about building cleanly — which happens to be exactly what we’ve always cared about.

What we’ve built into our starter

As a studio that doesn’t use page builders and writes our own boilerplate from scratch, we were in a good position to bake GEO in properly rather than patching it on. Our custom winc-seo.php plugin — built to replace bloated third-party SEO plugins across every build, now handles this as standard:

• Clean, semantic schema markup generated from real page content and ACF fields, not guessed at by a generic plugin
• An llms.txt file on every site, giving AI tools a direct, structured summary of what the site is and what it does
• No plugin bloat — the lean, no-page-builder approach we already use for performance also means less noise for any crawler, human or machine, to wade through
• Sitemaps, redirects and canonical URLs handled properly from day one, so nothing is left to chance or to a plugin’s default settings

It’s a natural extension of how we already build — sustainable, high-performance, no more code than necessary — just aimed at a slightly wider audience than it used to be.

Why this matters for purpose-driven organisations

The clients we work with — universities, charities, sustainability bodies — are exactly the kind of organisations people are now asking AI tools about, not just searching for by name. “What are the best retrofit grants in the Southwest?” “Which Bristol charities work on X?” If your site isn’t structured for an LLM to read and trust, you’re invisible in that conversation, no matter how well you rank on Google.

Final thought

This isn’t about chasing a trend. It’s about the same principle that’s always driven how we build: a clean, well-structured, lightweight website is better for everyone reading it — whether that reader is a person, a search engine, or a language model.

If your website was built more than a year or two ago, it’s worth asking: what would an AI tool actually say about you, if someone asked it right now?

We’ve built a tool that you can use to check how visible you are. Not only does it check how structured your website is but it also gives insight into your load times and other issues your website might have.

Try it out