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How to make your WordPress site agent-ready

WordPress runs a large share of the web, which means a large share of the sites AI agents are trying, and often failing, to read cleanly. The good news: WordPress is one of the easiest platforms to make agent-ready, because most of the work is adding small files and a little server behaviour, not rebuilding your theme. Here is a sensible order of work.

Start with the free, static wins

None of these touch your theme or your checkout:

  • Publish an llms.txt at your site root: a short, curated guide pointing agents to your key pages. (What is llms.txt? explains what goes in a good one.) Upload it to the root via your host's file manager or a small plugin.
  • Check your sitemap.xml is real XML, not an HTML page returning 200. Yoast, Rank Math and most SEO plugins generate a valid one; confirm it loads and lists your important URLs.
  • Set an intentional robots policy, including a Content-Signal directive stating what agents may train on, search and use. Edit robots.txt directly or via your SEO plugin.
  • Add the /.well-known/ discovery files: an api-catalog and, if you expose any public API, an openapi.json. WooCommerce already has a read-only product API worth describing truthfully.

That handful of files is what took a real WooCommerce shop from a score of 6 to 46. See the full case study.

Then the higher-value server behaviour

The biggest readability gain is serving clean Markdown when an agent asks for it (Accept: text/markdown). On WordPress this means a small plugin or server rule that returns a Markdown version of a page instead of the full HTML. It is more involved than dropping in a file, and it is the single strongest readability signal. We wrote a dedicated guide: serving Markdown to AI agents.

What not to do

  • Do not install ten plugins chasing a score. Each one is weight and risk. Prefer a couple of small, targeted additions.
  • Do not advertise capabilities you do not have. If your openapi.json describes an endpoint, it must work. Truthful and minimal beats impressive and broken.
  • Do not assume your SEO plugin already did this. Good technical SEO helps (see agent-ready vs SEO-ready), but the agent-specific signals are additional.

Check your number first

Before you change anything, get a baseline so you fix the right things in the right order.

Scan your WordPress site free and get the fixes ranked by impact. No sign-up, just a URL.

See where your site stands

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