Built for the search engines your customers are actually using now.
SEO by Gus is a WordPress plugin that treats being cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode as seriously as ranking on page one. Every classic SEO feature is here too – it’s just not where the plugin stops.
Open any article on a site running SEO by Gus and you’ll see it: an “Ask in AI Search” button sitting right under the title. Click it and the article opens directly inside ChatGPT or Perplexity with a prompt already filled in, asking the AI to summarise what you just read. No copying, no pasting, no explaining what the page is about. The reader does in one click what used to take three.
THe why
I’ve spent fifteen years watching SEO plugins get built for one search engine. Type a keyword into the settings screen, get a green traffic light, done. That worked because there was only one place worth optimising for – the ten blue links on Google.
That’s not true anymore. People are asking ChatGPT to compare products before they ever open a browser tab. They’re getting a full answer from Google’s AI Mode without clicking a single result. Perplexity is doing the research a customer used to do themselves, across a dozen tabs, and handing back a summary with sources attached.
Yoast and Rank Math weren’t built for any of that, because none of it existed when they were built. They’re adding AI toggles now because they have to. But bolting a feature onto a plugin that was architected around meta descriptions and green traffic lights isn’t the same as building for AI search from the ground up.
I built SEO by Gus because I wanted the second thing, not the first.
This is generative engine optimisation, or GEO – the practice of making content easy for an AI model to find, understand, and cite, the same way SEO makes content easy for Google to crawl and rank. SEO by Gus treats GEO as a first-class feature set, not a settings-page afterthought.
GEO is the reason I built this. It isn’t the only thing it does. SEO by Gus replaces your SEO plugin, not sits alongside it.
You get the full classic stack: meta titles and descriptions with template variables, automatic JSON-LD schema across Organization, Article, Person, Breadcrumb, FAQ and more, XML sitemaps, a redirect manager with a one-click 404 fixer, automatic alt text, a robots.txt editor, and IndexNow pings for Bing and Yandex.
On top of that: a site-wide SEO analyser that catches thin content, duplicate titles, and missing descriptions alongside GEO readiness, semantic internal link suggestions powered by embeddings, and a table of contents engine that doubles as a citability booster. A GSC and GA4 dashboard, including AI referral tracking, rounds it out – connected through my own hosted relay, or bring your own Google credentials if you’d rather.
I know what it takes to walk away from a plugin you’ve spent years configuring, because I’ve built sites on Yoast and Rank Math myself. That’s why the first thing SEO by Gus does on activation is offer to import your existing setup, not ask you to start over.
Titles, descriptions, focus keywords, canonicals, noindex and nofollow flags, social images, and your site-wide templates all pull across from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or All in One SEO v4 and above. There are also import adapters for Redirection, Simple 301 Redirects, and two schema plugins, All In One Schema Rich Snippets and SASWP.
The import only fills gaps. If a field is already set, running the import again won’t touch it – so there’s no risk of accidentally overwriting work you’ve already done, even if you run it more than once.
SEO by Gus is also the direct successor to Meridian SEO, my earlier plugin. If you’re on Meridian, your data migrates automatically.
Every feature in SEO by Gus is its own module. Turn one off and it loads zero code – nothing sitting dormant in the background, no bloat you’re paying a performance cost for just because a feature exists somewhere in the plugin.
Your Google Search Console and GA4 connection runs through my own infrastructure – encrypted tokens, signed handoffs, rate limiting – never through a third-party data broker. Your Google connection never passes through anyone else’s servers.
Ask in AI Search ships turned off by default. It’s the only module that does, on purpose, so an update never adds a visible element to the front end of your live site without you choosing it first.
The migration tools weren’t guessed at. I read the actual source code of Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, and the other plugins SEO by Gus imports from, so the field mappings are based on how those plugins actually store data. Where a mapping wasn’t confirmed, it’s skipped rather than silently guessed and written wrong.
Google’s ten blue links aren’t going anywhere. But they’re not the only place a customer finds you anymore, and the plugin running your SEO should account for that, not treat it as a bonus feature.