Nothing appears on my site after setup

By the end of this page you will know whether RankReady is actually running, using checks you can run yourself. The short version: most of what RankReady produces is not meant to be seen by a human visitor, so an unchanged-looking site is usually a working site.

What you are seeing

You installed RankReady, worked through the settings, and your pages look exactly as they did before. No new box on the front end, no visible change in your SEO plugin, nothing obviously different in the post editor. It feels like the plugin did not install correctly.

Why it happens

RankReady’s output is addressed to machines. It publishes files and headers that AI crawlers and agents read: an index at /llms.txt, a full corpus at /llms-full.txt, clean Markdown versions of your posts, a WebMCP manifest, and a managed block inside robots.txt. None of that changes how a page looks in a browser.

It also sits alongside your existing SEO plugin rather than replacing it. RankReady works with Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework and Slim SEO, and it has no title editor, no meta description editor and no XML sitemap. If you were expecting new fields in those areas, you will not find them, by design.

The Dashboard tab is the quickest place to see which features are switched on.

1. Look at the Dashboard

Open the RankReady menu in wp-admin. It opens on the Dashboard tab. This is where you confirm which features are on. The other four tabs are AI Visibility, AI Content, Insights and Settings.

If the menu item is missing entirely, that is a genuine install problem. Check Plugins and confirm RankReady is activated, and that you are running WordPress 6.9 or newer on PHP 7.4 or newer.

2. Load the endpoints directly

This is the real test. Visit these URLs on your own site, substituting your domain:

/llms.txt, the AI-readable index of your site
/llms-full.txt, your corpus in one file
/index.md, your homepage as Markdown
/your-post-slug.md, any single post as Markdown with YAML frontmatter
/okf/, the Open Knowledge Format bundle
/.well-known/mcp.json, the WebMCP manifest

Each one only exists if you enabled it in AI Visibility, so a 404 on a feature you never turned on is expected. If you enabled it and still get a 404, re-save Settings > Permalinks, which rebuilds WordPress rewrite rules.

One special case: /.well-known/mcp.json returning 403 rather than 404 is a server problem. nginx blocks dotfile paths by default and no plugin can override that. It needs a server configuration change.

3. Check robots.txt

Load /robots.txt and look for the managed section between # BEGIN RankReady and # END RankReady. Inside it you will find the crawler rules you set, covering 29 named AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and Bytespider.

You will also see a mirrored group for Googlebot and Facebook’s link crawler that repeats your existing User-agent: * rules. Those groups exist so scanners see the bots named explicitly. They do not change what those crawlers are allowed to do.

4. Test content negotiation on a canonical URL

Distinct .md URLs always return Markdown whatever you ask for, which keeps them safe to cache. Negotiation happens on the canonical URL instead. Test it from a command line:

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://example.com/your-post/
curl -H "Accept: text/html" https://example.com/your-post/

The first should return Markdown, the second HTML. An unsupported type returns 406, which is the correct answer rather than an error on your side.

Insights records crawler hits over time. Give it days, not minutes.

5. Give Insights time

The Insights tab records AI crawler activity and referrals. It will be empty immediately after setup, because it can only report visits that have already happened. Check back after a few days of normal traffic.

Read it honestly when data does arrive. A crawler hit proves your page was fetched. It does not prove your page was quoted in an answer.

6. What you should expect to see on the page

Two RankReady features do produce visible or inspectable output on the front end. The Author Box renders on the page where you enable it. Schema is emitted as JSON-LD in the page source: Article, Speakable, FAQPage and Person.

To check schema, view the page source and search for "@type":"Article". Two things commonly explain an empty result. First, Article schema needs a generated AI summary on that post, and returns nothing without one. Second, when Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress is active, RankReady merges into that plugin’s existing graph rather than adding a second block, so the entry is inside their JSON-LD, not next to it.

The one-minute version

Load /llms.txt and /robots.txt. If both look right, RankReady is running. The rest of what it does is invisible on purpose.