Visibility — Lightweight SEO for Search and AI
Visibility is the SEO essentials without the suite. It covers what most sites actually need (meta titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter Cards, JSON-LD schema, robots directives, redirects and the native XML sitemap) in about 145 KB, with no Pro tier, no upsell banners and nothing phoning home. It is built on WordPress core APIs (wp_robots, wp_sitemaps_*, register_post_meta, the Block Editor), so most of the work is the platform’s, already optimized.
Coming from Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress? Visibility imports your titles, descriptions, robots, Open Graph, schema and redirects in one click, so switching takes minutes. And the clean metadata it outputs is exactly what search engines and AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) read to understand and cite your content: the AEO/GEO angle, without the bloat.
Four modules you toggle independently from the Overview tab:
- Discover — meta title and description, Open Graph and Twitter Cards, and Article, BreadcrumbList and Person JSON-LD with a schema @type per content type. Per-post and per-term overrides for title, description, canonical, social title and description, and image.
- Indexing — bulk or per-item noindex / nofollow by post type and taxonomy, with smart exclusions and rules for search, 404, date, paginated, attachment and author archives plus RSS feeds. Quick Edit, Bulk actions and a Robots column on your lists.
- Sitemaps — control over the native XML sitemap: exclude post types, taxonomies, users, posts and terms; lastmod dates; 301s from old sitemap URLs; and anything noindexed is kept out automatically.
- Redirects — a lightweight 301 / 302 / 307 / 410 manager resolved in PHP (no .htaccess, no custom table, no 404 log), with CSV import / export, suggested redirects when you delete a post, and the WordPress slug-change redirects surfaced to manage.
Per-post controls live in a single Block Editor panel, with a matching Classic Editor meta box, plus Quick Edit and Bulk actions on the post list.
Visibility replaces a full SEO suite, it does not run alongside one: two SEO plugins fight over the <head>. If it detects Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework or Slim SEO active, it warns you on the settings page so you run only one. The exact footprint, the migration detail and the recommended companion plugins are below.
Perfect companions
Visibility is fully independent — these plugins aren’t required — but they pair really well with it:
- VigIA — AI visibility, crawler analytics, Site Identity JSON-LD on the home page. Visibility coordinates
@idreferences with VigIA so both can add schema without duplicating the Organization or WebSite nodes. - AI Share & Summarize — share buttons for social networks and AI assistants. Helps your content reach both audiences and language models.
- AI Content Signals — control how AI systems can use your content (training, search, both) through
robots.txtdirectives endorsed by Cloudflare. - Vigilante — all-in-one WordPress security: firewall, login protection, security headers, 2FA, file integrity monitoring.
External services
This plugin connects to Gravatar (operated by Automattic Inc.) to check whether the post or page author has a public Gravatar avatar, so it can be exposed in Open Graph tags (og:image) and in Person JSON-LD (image) for E-E-A-T.
What data is sent and when:
- When a singular view is rendered and the Open Graph module is active, and no other image source exists (per-post
og:image, featured image, WooCommerce gallery image, inline content image), the plugin sends an MD5 hash of the lowercased and trimmed author email tohttps://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=404viawp_remote_head()(HEAD request, no body). - When an author archive is rendered and the Person schema module is active, the same probe is performed for that author.
- The original email address is never sent — only an MD5 hash, which is the standard Gravatar lookup mechanism.
- The result (found / not found) is cached for 24 hours in a transient so subsequent page loads do not hit Gravatar again.
This is the same mechanism WordPress itself uses to display Gravatar avatars in comments. Gravatar’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/
Performance and security
«Lightweight» should be a measurement, not a slogan. These are the real numbers for this release, refreshed on every update.
Footprint (1.6.0)
- Download size: about 145 KB zipped.
- Codebase: 32 PHP files, roughly 12,500 lines of PHP.
- Zero custom database tables. Settings live in a single autoloaded option; per-post, per-term and per-author values use native WordPress meta that is already in the object cache.
- Zero cron jobs and no scheduled background processes.
- Zero external HTTP calls, with a single exception: a cached Gravatar HEAD probe (24-hour TTL) that exposes the author avatar for E-E-A-T, the same lookup WordPress already performs for comment avatars.
- Built on WordPress core APIs (
wp_robots,wp_sitemaps_*,register_post_meta,get_canonical_url, the Block Editor), not private reimplementations, so most of the work is the platform’s and already optimized.
Security
- Every release passes a security audit of the changed code (sanitization, escaping, nonces, capabilities, SQL) before it ships. It is a release gate, not an afterthought.
- Minimal attack surface by design: no custom tables, no unauthenticated endpoints, output escaped where it is emitted, input validated against allowlists, and prepared statements for every database query.
- No premium tier, no telemetry, no data collection. Nothing phones home.
A smaller surface is a smaller target.
Support
Need private support or custom development?
Do you need one-on-one help, priority troubleshooting, or a custom feature, integration, or tweak built specifically for your site? I offer private support and custom development. Just contact me and tell me what you need.
Need help or have suggestions?
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About AyudaWP
We are specialists in WordPress security, SEO, AI and performance optimization plugins. We create tools that solve real problems for WordPress site owners while maintaining the highest coding standards and accessibility requirements.