My website, sosmymarketing.com has been online since I started my business in 2008. In internet years, that’s ancient. Over nearly two decades, this site has been redesigned, re-platformed, re-templated, and redecorated more times than I can honestly count. Every redesign added something new. Almost none of them cleaned up what came before.
Sound familiar? If you’ve had a WordPress site for more than a few years, it probably does.
I finally did what I tell my clients to do all the time: I stopped adding new rooms and went down to the basement with a flashlight. What I found was a website that looked fine from the street but had years of junk piled up where visitors — and increasingly, AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — couldn’t see it. So I ran a full AI visibility audit, cleaned house, and want to walk you through exactly what that looked like, because if your WordPress site has a similar history, you’re probably sitting on the same kind of mess.
The House Nobody Inspected
This isn’t a metaphor I’m reaching for. Back in 2008, when I started this business, I taught classes for entrepreneurs on how to build their first website — and I explained it exactly this way. The URL is the land. Hosting is where you put the bones of the house. WordPress is how you decorate that house with words and pictures. Ah, how simple things were back then.
Eighteen years later, it turns out the same analogy is the most honest way to describe what happens to a house nobody’s fully inspected since it was built. Think of a website like a house you’ve owned for many years. You’ve repainted, you’ve swapped out the furniture, maybe you knocked down a wall or two. But nobody’s been in the attic since 2012, and nobody’s checked what the last three contractors left behind in the basement.
That’s what an old WordPress site usually looks like under the hood:
- Doors that don’t open.
Broken internal links and redirect chains — pages pointing to pages that pointed to pages that don’t exist anymore. - Unlabeled rooms.
Images with no alt text, meaning neither search engines nor AI tools have any idea what’s actually in them. - No address on file.
Nollms.txtorllms-full.txt— the modern equivalent of AI tools not having your address, so they can’t reliably find or understand your site. - A duplicated front door.
Two H1 headings on the homepage, which confuses search engines and AI crawlers about what the page is actually about. - Old plumbing.
A slow server response time (TTFB) from caching that had quietly been half-broken for who knows how long.
None of this is visible to a regular visitor scrolling through the homepage. All of it matters enormously to the search engines and AI systems trying to understand, index, and recommend your site.
The Inspection: Running the Numbers
I used an AI Visibility Score tool that grades a site across five categories — think of it as a home inspector’s checklist for whether AI tools can actually find, read, and trust your site:
| Category | What it really means | Starting score |
|---|---|---|
| Access and AI discovery | Can AI crawlers even get in the front door? | 20/37 |
| Structured data and semantic context | Does the site have its paperwork in order — the deed that says what it actually is? | 16/25 |
| Content structure and readability | Is the house laid out logically, with rooms that are clearly labeled? | 13/20 |
| AI interaction and distribution | Can visitors (including AI tools) actually get around once they’re inside? | 4/8 |
| Access performance | How fast does the water actually come out of the tap? | 4/10 |
Total: 57 out of 100. Not falling down. Not exactly move-in ready either.
The Renovation
Here’s what actually got fixed, room by room:
Fixed the doors. Cleaned up broken redirect chains and 404s across the site, and updated internal links that were still pointing at old, redirected URLs.
Labeled every room. Used AI to write proper alt text for every image across the site — 27 out of 66 images were missing alt text completely — so both screen readers and AI tools know exactly what they’re looking at, not just that “an image exists here.”
Filed the paperwork. Verified and cleaned up the structured data (schema) that tells search engines and AI tools what kind of business this actually is, not just what the words on the page say.
Put the address on file. Generated llms-full.txt — a complete, AI-readable copy of the site’s content — and turned on Markdown endpoints, so any AI agent that wants to read a page cleanly, without wading through a decade of design layers, now can.
Fixed the duplicated front door. Found two H1 headings stacked on top of each other on the homepage (leftover from an old responsive design pattern) and cleaned it down to one, like it should have been all along.
Rewired the electrical. This was the big one. The site’s hosting had three layers of caching available, and only two were switched on — the object cache (Memcached) had silently been off. Once it was properly connected, homepage response time (TTFB) dropped from 701 milliseconds to 22 milliseconds. That’s not a typo. That’s the difference between a slow drip and a fully open tap.
Checked who’s allowed on the property. Also found a years-old list of entire countries blocked at the hosting level — including the UK, Canada, Germany, and Singapore. Nobody remembered why it was there. Beyond turning away legitimate visitors from major markets, it was likely blocking AI crawler traffic too, since Germany and Singapore both host major cloud data centers. Trimmed it down to what actually made sense to keep.
Results of the AI Visibility Optimization Work
| Category | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | 57/100 | 92/100 — A+ |
| Access and AI discovery | 20/37 | 37/37 |
| Structured data and semantic context | 16/25 | 21/25 |
| Content structure and readability | 13/20 | 16/20 |
| AI interaction and distribution | 4/8 | 8/8 |
| Access performance | 4/10 | 10/10 |
2Same site. Same content, mostly. No redesign. Just years of accumulated junk cleared out, room by room, until search engines and AI tools alike could actually walk through the whole house.
What I Learned Cleaning My Old Website
The honest truth: nothing I found was exotic. It was the ordinary residue of a site that had been through a lot of hands and a lot of years without anyone doing a full inspection. That’s not a special SOS problem — it’s a WordPress problem. WordPress makes it easy to keep adding rooms. It doesn’t do much to make you clean out the ones you’re not using anymore.
If your WordPress website has been through a few redesigns and nobody’s checked what’s in the attic, I can help. That’s exactly the kind of audit I just ran on my own site — and it’s the same process I use for clients who’ve had the same nagging feeling that their site “should be doing better than it is.”
Book a free strategy session and let’s conduct an AI Visibility Audit to get your WordPress site cleaned up!
P.S. A few days after finishing the renovation, Google Search Console flagged one more thing: an old, nonexistent URL — a literal wildcard character where a page should be — that it had crawled and never found. I traced it back through the sitemap, robots.txt, redirects, and templates expecting to find one more leftover mess. Instead, I found nothing. It had already been fixed, quietly, as a side effect of all that redirect cleanup during the renovation. Sometimes you find out you patched the leak before you even knew it was there.
1AI Visibility Score Reference 