Switching SEO plugins is the job you postpone because you remember the last time. Export. Import. A title that went blank. Two weeks of “did we tank?” while Search Console catches up. That fear is why people stay on Yoast long after they have stopped liking it.
Rankify does not ask you to migrate. It reads the titles, descriptions, canonicals, focus keywords and robots settings you already wrote in Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, or SEOPress, and serves them as they are. Nothing is copied, moved or deleted. The old plugin can stay installed while you look. Anything you later write in Rankify takes over from that point. You can switch back.
That is the unglamorous half. The reason we built the plugin is the half Yoast never shows you.
Ranked is not the same as quoted
Classic SEO is a ranking problem: a title that survives Google’s pixel truncation, a sitemap that skips noindex URLs, a 301 that does not loop, schema Google can follow as one graph. Get that wrong and you do not show up in the blue links.
GEO (generative engine optimization, what we call answer-engine optimization on the Rankify page) is a citation problem. Someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews a question. The assistant reads a few pages and names a few of them. You either get named or you do not. That depends on things a rank tracker cannot see: whether those assistants’ citation crawlers can reach you, whether a passage still makes sense on its own, and whether the click even shows up in Analytics.
Analytics usually buckets that visit as “referral” or drops it. Assistants often strip the referrer. Rankify is built to count the fetch, and the return visit, from the tracking parameter the assistant puts on its own links, so the visit still counts when the referrer is gone.
We already published a roundup that points people at Ahrefs, Semrush and Frase for AI-aided SEO. None of them sit on your WordPress site and tell you OAI-SearchBot read a URL on Tuesday, or that a person then arrived from a ChatGPT answer. That is what Rankify is for.
This is not a mockup. It is Rankify Pro on daftplug.com, last 90 days. Page cache is on, so crawler counts are a floor, not a total: 326 crawler requests, 9 distinct crawlers, 226 pages read. OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT citations) hit 15 pages. PerplexityBot hit 8. GPTBot, the training crawler, hit 21. Visitors who actually arrived from an answer in that window: 6 from DuckDuckGo AI, 2 from Copilot, 1 from ChatGPT.
You cannot get cited if you blocked the crawler that cites
Most “block AI” checklists treat every bot as a trainer. They are not.
Rankify’s crawler control is sixteen crawlers across ten vendors, each labelled before you choose. Training crawlers (GPTBot and CCBot) gather text to train a model. Blocking those costs you nothing directly. Citation crawlers (OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT answers, PerplexityBot for Perplexity) are how those products find pages to quote. Block those and you disappear from the answers, and from the traffic they send.
The default instinct, a robots.txt deny-all for anything with “GPT” in the name, is how sites quietly opt out of being quoted. Rankify lets you allow the citers and still refuse the trainers, one crawler at a time.
On this site all sixteen are allowed, and llms.txt is published: a readable map of the site written for models, served virtually rather than as a file on disk.
On Pro, crawler identity is verified against reverse DNS and the IP ranges vendors publish, so a spoofed user agent cannot inflate the log. The free crawler log the product describes is seven days. Pro keeps ninety, and adds the referral side: visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot.
A page’s Google position can only be known by asking Google. Rankify does not scrape it. It reports what it can observe from your server: coverage, broken URLs, which assistants read you, and which ones sent someone back.
Keep Yoast’s titles. Fix the parts it was never measuring.
Reading Yoast in place only works if the ranking half is not a downgrade.
Titles are one template per post type, twenty-five variables, with a live Google preview measured in the pixel width Google actually cuts at, not a character count that lies about capital letters. Per-page overrides when a page needs its own line.
Schema is a single @graph. The page points at its author, the author at the organization, the breadcrumb trail matches the one on screen. Most plugins emit loose blocks and hope they join up. Product, Recipe, Event, How-to, Course and the rest of the rich library sit on Pro, including WooCommerce Product schema from live price, stock, rating, brand and GTIN, rewritten when the product changes rather than on a cron guess.
Redirects only run on requests that would 404, so a rule cannot shadow a page that exists. Loop detection runs at save. The 404 monitor is the list of URLs people still hit. Pro writes the redirect for you when you rename a slug, chain-free.
Content analysis runs in the browser: focus keyword, readability, headings, links, alt text. No account, no API key, nothing uploaded. Two Pro features make outbound requests, both optional: IndexNow, and the crawler-verification download of published IP ranges.
Answer blocks, on Pro, mark questions and answers as FAQ and QAPage schema from the block editor (the format Google rich results and answer engines actually read), with a retrieval score so a passage is built to be quoted, not just indexed.
Two SEO plugins both emitting meta tags will duplicate. Rankify warns when another plugin competes on Open Graph. Deactivate Yoast once you are happy with what Rankify is serving. The Yoast data stays where it is.
What you are actually buying
Rankify is not a second SEO subscription. It is one of five Pro plugins on a DaftPlug membership. One licence unlocks Rankify (SEO and GEO), Progressify (PWA), Lightify (performance), Generatify (AI) and Snapshotify (backups). Plans differ only by site count: Pro $37.99/year (1 site), Pro Plus $74.99/year (5), Pro Max $138.99/year (100). Features are identical. Checkout is Freemius. Fourteen-day money-back.
Titles, sitemaps, connected schema, redirects, 404s, in-browser analysis, robots.txt, llms.txt, crawler control and a seven-day crawler log are the free layer. Pro is the answer-engine layer: AI referral tracking, verified crawler identity, ninety-day history, answer blocks and retrieval score, WooCommerce and Local SEO, auto-redirect on slug change, and the rest on the feature comparison.
A free WordPress.org listing for Rankify is not live yet. Do not search the plugin directory for it. That slug is a different product. Start on the Rankify product page. A membership unlocks Rankify Pro with the rest of the suite.
If you already paid for Yoast and a rank tracker, you already paid for titles and a Google position. You did not pay anyone to tell you whether ChatGPT read the page, or whether a person came back from the answer. Rankify is built to close that gap without making you rip the titles out first.