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Rankify ships with the right defaults, so this is less about turning things on than about supplying the handful of values only you know.

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1. Confirm the site is visible

Go to Settings > Reading and make sure Discourage search engines from indexing this site is unticked. This is the single most common cause of a site not ranking, and it usually happens because someone left staging settings on at launch. Rankify raises it at the top of its own settings screen, so you will see it there too.

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2. Deactivate any other SEO plugin

Two plugins writing titles and meta descriptions produce duplicates. You do not need to export anything first, because Rankify reads what the old plugin stored.

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3. Say who publishes the site

Settings > Schema. Choose whether the site represents an organization or a person, and set the name. This is the root of your structured data, and everything else attaches to it. Add the Organization Logo at the same time: a square image, at least 112 by 112 pixels, which is what Google requires for organization rich results.

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4. Set a fallback share image

Settings > Social > Default Share Image. At least 1200 by 630 pixels. Every page without a featured image uses this when shared. Without one, a link posted to Slack, WhatsApp, or LinkedIn renders as a bare line of text. While you are there, fill in your Social Profiles. They become sameAs links in your structured data, which is how search engines and AI assistants confirm those accounts and this site are the same entity.

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5. Submit your sitemap

Rankify generates /sitemap.xml automatically, but nothing tells the search engines it exists.
1

Google Search Console

Add the property, verify it with the code from Settings > General > Site Verification, then submit https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
2

Bing Webmaster Tools

Same sitemap URL. Bing also feeds several AI assistants, so this matters more than it used to.
Settings > Content Types lists every post type, taxonomy, and special page with a noindex switch. The defaults are already sensible. Search results are permanently noindexed because the URL space is infinite. Two worth a moment’s thought:
On a single-author site these duplicate your blog index exactly. Noindex them, or disable them entirely.
Year, month, and day listings rarely rank and duplicate your category pages. Most sites should noindex them.

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7. Check your title template

Settings > General > Titles & Meta. The default is %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%, which is right for most sites. Change the Title Separator if you prefer a pipe or dash. Keep it consistent, because mixed separators across a site look careless in a results page.

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8. Turn on the AI side

Settings > AI & GEO. Most of this is already on.
1

Confirm llms.txt is published

Visit https://example.com/llms.txt. It should list your important pages with short summaries.
2

Leave AI crawlers allowed

Blocking them also removes you from AI answers that cite sources. Only block if you have a specific reason.
3

Let the crawler log fill up

It records which assistants fetch which pages. Give it a week before it says anything useful.

Answer engine optimization

What being citable actually requires, and how to measure it.

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9. Turn on the alerts worth having

Settings > Notifications. Everything is off by default, and each has a threshold so nothing floods you. The two worth enabling on any site:
  • Email when something is badly wrong tells you if the site starts blocking search engines or the sitemap stops being served. At most once a week, and silent once fixed.
  • Email when a URL keeps returning 404 tells you something is still linking to an address that no longer exists.
Send a test first. Mail on WordPress is configured outside the plugin and fails silently more often than anything else on a site.

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What to leave alone

News is only useful if you are approved in Google News. Video only if you actually publish video.
Attachment pages are thin duplicates of an image. Leave them disabled.
The generated file already references your sitemap and handles AI crawler rules. Add directives only when you know exactly what you are blocking; a wrong line here can remove your whole site from search.

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Then wait

SEO changes do not show up quickly. Search engines have to recrawl, and rankings move over weeks. Use the overview checklist to confirm the configuration is right, and use the AI crawler log to see who is reading you, which updates far faster than rankings do.