Documentation

PressHangar AI Citations docs

How to install PressHangar AI Citations, set up AI crawler rules, get FAQ schema detected correctly, and decide whether physical robots.txt mode and llms.txt are right for your site.

Getting started

1
Install and activate
Install PressHangar AI Citations from Plugins → Add New, or upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins/ and activate it manually. Then visit Settings → PressHangar AI Citations — no configuration is required to get sensible defaults.
2
Choose your bots
Open the AI Crawlers tab and review the default Allow/Block settings for GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and the rest. Adjust any you want to handle differently, then check the FAQ Schema tab if your posts use a question-and-answer format.
3
Optional: turn on physical mode
If you want your AI crawler rules to always win — even against other plugins or unusual hosting setups — enable physical robots.txt mode from the AI Crawlers tab. It's opt-in; virtual mode is the default and works for the vast majority of sites.

FAQ schema setup

PressHangar AI Citations looks for a simple, consistent pattern in your post content and turns it into FAQPage JSON-LD.

Detection pattern: PressHangar AI Citations recognizes question-and-answer pairs formatted as <strong>Q. Your question here</strong><br>A. Your answer here. Each question/answer pair in a post becomes one FAQPage entry.
Custom prefixes: Prefer different labels than "Q." and "A."? Set your own custom prefixes in the FAQ Schema tab — PressHangar AI Citations will match against whatever prefix you configure instead.
Duplicate-schema guard: Before generating anything, PressHangar AI Citations checks whether Yoast SEO or Rank Math is already outputting FAQ schema on that page. If so, it skips the page entirely, so you never end up with two competing JSON-LD blocks.
Preview before you publish: The FAQ Schema tab shows a live preview of the Q&A pairs PressHangar AI Citations has detected on a given page, so you can confirm the schema looks right before it goes live.

Physical robots.txt mode

Most robots.txt plugins filter WordPress's virtual robots.txt output through a hook. That's the default in PressHangar AI Citations too, and it's the right choice for almost every site. Physical mode is for the cases where a virtual override isn't reliable enough: it writes your AI crawler rules directly into a real robots.txt file at your site root, so they always take effect — no other plugin's hook can quietly cancel them.

Automatic backups

Before writing anything, PressHangar AI Citations backs up your existing robots.txt file so you can restore the previous version at any time from the AI Crawlers tab.

Clear markers

PressHangar AI Citations writes its rules inside clearly labeled marker comments in robots.txt, so its section is easy to identify and never overwrites content outside those markers.

Manual-copy fallback

If your hosting environment doesn't allow PressHangar AI Citations to write to the file directly (some locked-down setups don't), it shows you the exact rules to copy and paste in yourself, instead of failing silently.

Physical mode is opt-in. Turn it on from the AI Crawlers tab only if you've seen your crawler rules get overridden, or if you want the strongest possible guarantee that they'll be respected.

About llms.txt

llms.txt is an emerging, informal convention — not a web standard, and not something every AI system reads. Some newer models are starting to recognize it, but there's no guarantee ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity will use yours. PressHangar AI Citations' llms.txt generator makes it easy to create and update one from Settings → PressHangar AI Citations → llms.txt, but treat it as an optional, early-stage experiment rather than a core part of your strategy — that's exactly how we'd want you to think about it.