DadsFam SEO is a complete, free SEO plugin for WordPress: on-page analysis, XML sitemaps, schema, OpenGraph, breadcrumbs and robots.txt, plus GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tools that help AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude find and cite your content. DadsFam AI is built in: SEO intelligence that learns your site and writes from your own words, entirely on your own server — no outside AI service, no API key, nothing sent anywhere. You can extend it with the optional DadsFam SEO Pro add-on plugin for the AI assistant, redirects and analytics — it plugs into the same dashboard.

Everything described below works on every site. Nothing is disabled, blurred out, time-limited or reduced.

Free Features

DadsFam AI, built in — SEO, AEO and GEO intelligence that runs entirely on your own server: no outside AI service, no API key, no account, nothing sent anywhere and nothing to pay per use. It reads every page and builds a map of what your site knows: the ideas it writes about, the topics its pages form and the main page each topic should point to. With search results connected it learns your own click rate at every position in Google and which kinds of titles and descriptions earn clicks on your site, then writes that way. It never invents facts: everything it suggests comes from your own pages
SEO Brain — A self-learning brain for SEO, AEO and GEO. It learns your site in the background, prepares fixes and explains each one in plain English (focus keywords, meta descriptions, SEO titles, alt text, schema, broken internal links, thin tag pages, empty settings), and on Autopilot applies them itself. DadsFam AI writes its descriptions from each page’s own sentences, its titles to fit Google’s width in pixels, its keywords from what people really type and its alt text from what the picture shows. It reads your sitemap pages the way Google does and keeps any that answer “noindex”, redirect or fail to load out of the sitemap. It only ever fills in what is empty, keeps an undo for every change and learns from what you accept, undo or rewrite
X-ray any page — See what DadsFam AI sees: the page’s topic, SEO titles that fit Google, descriptions from your own words, focus keywords people would type, the questions people ask and whether the page answers them, the answer AI engines would quote, key takeaways, an FAQ from the page’s own sections and what to fix first
Topics, gaps and near-duplicates — Your site’s topics and whether their pages link to the main one, subjects your headings cover that deserve a page of their own, pages that say nearly the same thing, and (with search results) what works on your site
The SEO Brain checks its own work — It re-reads what it wrote by itself and takes back what its checks of today would not write (never your own words), learns from the values you rewrite, and notices and works around a run that dies part-way. About five weeks after each change to a description, schema type or homepage title, it compares real search results before and after, allowing for how your whole site moved: what worked teaches it, what cost clicks is changed back. It also learns what people really search for: keywords, pages close to page one, questions a page could answer, and what AI assistants do on your site. Needs a results source such as DadsFam SEO Pro (Google Search Console or its own visit counts); developers can supply their own through filters
The SEO Brain fixes what it finds on your live pages — It reads your pages the way Google does and flags what breaks SEO from outside the plugin: another SEO tool also writing tags, a canonical pointing elsewhere, two titles, the same schema twice. It adds internal links to the pages that need them from your pages that already mention their focus keyword, finds pages losing search traffic and says why, lists pages that share one title in Google, and (with DadsFam SEO Pro) redirects dead addresses people still visit to the page they meant. Every change can be undone, and pages it changes are cleared from your page cache at once
Weekly SEO Brain email — Off until you switch it on: every Monday, what the Brain changed, whether it worked, what is waiting for you, pages close to page one and pages losing traffic
On-Page SEO Analysis — 26-point weighted scoring engine covering keyword placement, density, content length, heading structure, internal/external links, image alt text, readability (Flesch-Kincaid, sentence length, passive voice, transition words) and more. Keywords are matched the way people write them, and titles are measured in pixels, the way Google cuts them
Category & Tag SEO — Full SEO panel on every category, tag, product category and custom taxonomy: title, description, focus keyword, canonical, noindex, live character counters and a Google preview
hreflang and Regional editions — Automatic language tags for Polylang, WPML and TranslatePress, and Regional editions for one business on several country sites (a .com and a .co.za): every site prints the same tags with an x-default, and the SEO Brain checks the other sites agree. Does nothing on single-language sites
Site Health Tests — Five SEO checks added to WordPress’s own Tools Site Health, including detection of the “Discourage search engines” box that silently deindexes entire sites
WP-CLI Commands — wp dfseo doctor, audit, rescore and sitemap for bulk work and deploy scripts
SERP Preview — Real-time desktop and mobile search result preview with character counters
Internal Link Suggestions — Finds related published content to link to, ranked by relevance to your focus keyword and title, and shows what you’ve already linked
XML Sitemaps — Cached index sitemap with per-type sub-sitemaps, a homepage sitemap, image sitemap, and search engine notification via IndexNow on publish
Schema / Structured Data — JSON-LD for Article, WebPage, WebSite + SearchAction, Organisation, BreadcrumbList, and Speakable
OpenGraph & Twitter Cards — Full social sharing meta tags with image support
Canonical URLs — Auto-generated or custom per-post canonical
Robots Directives — noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet per post
Robots.txt Management — Live virtual robots.txt with custom rules support
Breadcrumbs — Schema-enhanced breadcrumbs via [dfseo_breadcrumbs] shortcode
Image SEO — Auto-inject focus keyword into alt text on upload
Site Verification — Google (HTML tag or HTML file), Bing, Yandex, Pinterest
Instant Indexing — IndexNow submission (Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Seznam, Naver), sent in the background and only from your live site, with manual bulk submission and history
SEO Score Column — Score column on posts, pages, and WooCommerce products
Dashboard Widget — Quick SEO health overview on WP admin home

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization (Free)

Get discovered and cited by AI answer engines, the next frontier of search:

llms.txt — Auto-generated AI content map served at /llms.txt (the emerging llmstxt.org standard)
AI Crawler Controls — Allow or block 13 major AI bots (OpenAI GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, Applebot, Meta AI, CCBot, Bytespider and more) from robots.txt
Speakable Schema — Marks content for voice assistants and AI read-aloud
GEO Content Checks — Analysis flags question-style headings, lists/tables, and concise direct-answer openings that AI engines prefer to quote

Pro Features (DadsFam SEO Pro add-on)

Install the DadsFam SEO Pro add-on plugin alongside this one and activate your licence to unlock:

DadsFam AI assistant — Ask about your site’s SEO in plain words: what to fix first, quick wins close to page one, pages losing traffic and why, keywords and titles for any page, the questions people search that you do not answer yet, how you do in AI answers, competing pages, links and topics, and a brief for a new page. Every answer comes from your own data, with changes you apply in one click and undo in another. It runs on your own server, like the rest of DadsFam AI
DadsFam AI in the editor — Titles and descriptions, the focus keyword from real searches, a page review, FAQs, an answer-first summary, a brief for a new page and text tidy-ups, from the page as it stands in the editor. The writing stays yours
Alt text in the media library — A “Write alt text” button next to every picture, from what your site knows about it
Real Keyword Data — Actual search queries, clicks, impressions, CTR and ranking position straight from the Google Search Console API
Real results for the SEO Brain — Google Search Console numbers (or Pro’s own visit counts) so the free SEO Brain can judge its changes, learn from them and find opportunities, and DadsFam AI can learn what earns clicks on your site
Redirect Manager — 301, 302, 307, 410 redirects with hit tracking and regex support
Auto-Redirect on URL Change — Automatically creates a 301 when a published post’s slug changes, with redirect-chain prevention
Analytics Dashboard — Organic traffic trends, engine breakdown, and content decay detection over 7–90 day windows
Bulk SEO Editor — Edit focus keyword, title, and description for hundreds of posts at once
FAQ Schema — FAQ rich results, with questions suggested by DadsFam AI
Local SEO — Full LocalBusiness schema with address, phone, geo-coordinates
Data Import — One-click import from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and All in One SEO
WooCommerce — Product schema and integration
News Sitemap — Google News-compatible sitemap
Google Indexing API — Direct URL submission to Google

A word about PRO

Right, let me be straight with you, because I hate being sold to as much as you do.

Everything above is free and it stays free. The scoring engine, XML sitemaps, schema, OpenGraph, canonicals, robots directives, breadcrumbs, internal link suggestions, Instant Indexing and the whole GEO toolkit — none of those are premium features. Those are the things an SEO plugin should just do, and if I put them behind a paywall I would be taking the mickey.

There is a PRO add-on. It exists because I am a dad in Cape Town, and this is one of the things that puts food on the table at my house. That is the honest reason. Not “unlock your potential”, not “supercharge your workflow”. Just: if this plugin helped your work get found and you can spare it, PRO helps me keep building.

What PRO adds is the heavier lifting you reach for once the basics are in place — an AI assistant that knows your site, DadsFam AI in the editor and the media library, real keyword data from Google Search Console, a redirect manager that catches slug changes on its own, an analytics dashboard, bulk editing across hundreds of posts at once, and one-click import from Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO. That is time saved and depth added. It is not the plugin working properly, because the plugin already works properly.

So if the free one does everything you need, brilliant. Genuinely. Use it, and I hope it gets your work in front of the people looking for it. If you get to the point where the extra depth would save you real time, PRO is at plugins.dadsfam.co.za.

Either way, thanks for using something I built. — Zak, DadsFam

DadsFam AI runs on your own server

DadsFam AI is part of this plugin, not a connection to someone else’s AI: it reads your pages from your own database, works on your own server and keeps what it learns there, with no API key, no account and nothing to pay per use. The DadsFam SEO Pro add-on’s assistant and editor tools use the same engine.

External services

This plugin connects to the services below, each only for the feature that needs it. No personal data is transmitted by the free plugin, and DadsFam AI is not one of them: it runs on your own server and sends nothing anywhere.

IndexNow (instant indexing)

While “Auto-Submit on Publish” is on (Settings Instant Indexing; it is on by default), the plugin tells participating search engines that a page has been published, updated or deleted, so they can recrawl it sooner. It sends the public address of the page, your site’s address, your site’s IndexNow key and the public location of that key file. It sends no personal data and no post content.

The automatic notice goes about a minute after you publish, update or delete a post, in one request for every page changed meanwhile, and only from your live site: a local or staging copy, or a site set to discourage search engines, sends nothing. The manual bulk-submit button on the same screen sends the addresses you enter straight away.

The requests go to:

api.indexnow.org – the shared IndexNow endpoint, which distributes the notification to participating engines including Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver. Terms: https://www.indexnow.org/terms – Privacy: https://www.indexnow.org/faq
www.bing.com/indexnow – Microsoft Bing’s own IndexNow endpoint, also pinged directly when you use the manual bulk-submit button. Terms: https://www.microsoft.com/servicesagreement – Privacy: https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement

Your own site

The Health Check screen requests pages on your own site and reads the HTML that comes back, so it can see what a search engine actually receives rather than trusting the settings. These requests go to your own domain only, and are made while you are on that screen or running wp dfseo doctor.

While the SEO Brain’s learning is switched on (Settings on the SEO Brain screen), its background run also loads pages of your own site: your homepage, when your theme builds it, so it can be scored and learned from what visitors see, and a few of the pages in your sitemap each hour, to find any that answer “noindex”, redirect or do not load. These requests go to your own domain only and send nothing but an ordinary page request.

Your other regional editions

Only if you set up Regional editions (Settings Advanced): the plugin loads the homepage of each other site you list there, at most once an hour, to check it carries the same hreflang tags as this one. It is an ordinary page request to the addresses you entered, with no data from this site attached, and it stops when you clear the list.

The DadsFam SEO Pro add-on is a separate plugin and discloses its own services (its licence server, Google Search Console and the Google Indexing API) in its own readme.

DadsFam SEO

About this plugin