Every RankReady setting explained

RankReady adds one menu item, RankReady, to wp-admin. Everything lives under five tabs. This page walks all five in order so you can find the screen that owns whatever you are trying to change.

Dashboard

URL: tab=dashboard. Your starting point and status overview. This tab is where you find the Re-run the setup wizard link, which reopens the three-step first-run wizard at any time. That wizard covers brand identity and the on-off state of the AI surfaces, so re-running it is a fast way to review those choices without visiting each subtab.

AI Visibility

URL: tab=crawlers. Note the slug: it is crawlers, not visibility. This is the largest tab and it owns every public file and endpoint RankReady serves. It has six subtabs.

Brand Identity, sub=brand

The single source of truth for who you are. Four fields: your site or brand name, a one-line summary capped at 160 characters that appears under the brand name in llms.txt, an optional About field under 500 characters that accepts Markdown, and your brand terms, the alternate names you want stated consistently. These are the same fields as step 1 of the setup wizard.

What you write here is reused in eight places: /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, /robots.txt, the AI Summary system prompt, the FAQ generation prompt, the two WebMCP abilities rankready-ai-llm-seo/get-site-info and rankready-ai-llm-seo/get-brand-terms, and the homepage Markdown at /index.md. Fill it in once and every downstream file picks it up.

Robots, sub=robots

Controls the block RankReady manages inside your robots.txt, between the # BEGIN RankReady and # END RankReady markers. This is where you set per-crawler permissions across the 29 named AI crawlers, and where the Content Signals directives ai-train, search and ai-input are configured. Nothing outside the markers is touched.

The same subtab holds the AI Snippet card. Option rnrd_max_snippet_default, default on. It adds max-snippet:-1 to the page robots meta tag. See the AI Snippet setting.

llms.txt, sub=llms

Owns two files. /llms.txt is an AI-readable index of the site. /llms-full.txt is the full corpus in one file. In the setup wizard, llms.txt is on by default and llms-full.txt is off by default, so if you have never seen the full file, that is why.

Markdown, sub=markdown

Controls the Markdown endpoints: /{post-slug}.md for any post, and /index.md for the homepage, each with YAML frontmatter. It also governs content negotiation on your canonical URLs, where Accept: text/markdown gets Markdown and an unsupported type gets a 406.

That same-URL switch is option rnrd_md_accept_negotiation. On a new install of 1.4.1 it starts off. A site that upgraded from an earlier version keeps it on. The distinct .md URLs work either way. When Content Signals are on, Markdown responses also carry a Content-Signal header. The Diagnostics report warns when a Cloudflare, Varnish, Fastly or LiteSpeed layer in front of the site could store the wrong version of a page.

WebMCP, sub=webmcp

Controls the manifest at /.well-known/mcp.json. Off by default in the setup wizard. On nginx this path returns 403 before WordPress sees it, which is a server configuration matter and not something the setting can fix.

OKF, sub=okf

Controls the Open Knowledge Format bundle at /okf/. On by default in the setup wizard.

AI Content

URL: tab=content. Everything RankReady writes into or about your posts. Four subtabs, and only the first two need an AI provider.

Summary, sub=summary

Settings for AI Summaries, including how and where a generated summary is displayed. Generation needs an API key for whichever provider you selected. Generation is unlimited, with no monthly caps. Summaries are stored in the _rnrd_summary post meta as {"bullets":[...]}.

One behaviour worth knowing before you plan a rollout: Article schema builds its description from the generated summary and returns early when there is none. A post with Article schema switched on but no summary generated emits no Article JSON-LD at all.

FAQ, sub=faq

Settings for the FAQ Generator. It needs an API key, and it can optionally use DataForSEO to find real People Also Ask questions. DataForSEO receives the focus keyword only, never your article text. FAQs are stored in the _rnrd_faq post meta as a flat array of {"question":...,"answer":...} objects.

Author Box, sub=author

Settings for the E-E-A-T author box and the Person JSON-LD it emits. No API key is involved: the fields come from the WordPress user profile, where RankReady adds them. The free plugin emits name, job title, employer, bio and headshot, and shows your Topics of Expertise as chips in the card layout. RankReady Pro extends the same node with profile links (sameAs), topics as knowsAbout, credentials, memberships and awards.

The Bulk Author Changer card sits at the bottom of this subtab. See how to reassign authors in bulk.

Schema, sub=schema

Which JSON-LD RankReady emits and how it behaves alongside your SEO plugin. Article, Speakable and FAQPage live here. When Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress is active, RankReady merges into that plugin’s graph rather than printing a second block, so the Article count stays at exactly one.

Insights

URL: tab=insights. Where you review what has happened rather than change what happens, across four subtabs: bot-activity (Training Bots), citation (Answer-engine bots), referral (Real AI Referrals) and freshness (Content Fresh). The Content Freshness scan card lives on the freshness subtab. All of it is collected on your own site. Read the numbers for what they are. A crawler hit tells you your page was fetched. It does not tell you the page was quoted anywhere.

Settings

URL: tab=settings. Plugin-level configuration rather than per-feature behaviour. Four subtabs: api-keys, cloudflare, headless and advanced. RankReady Pro adds a License section here when it is installed.

API Keys, sub=api-keys

Paste your own key for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini or DeepSeek. Keys are stored in your site’s own wp_options table, encrypted at rest. They are needed only for AI Summaries and the FAQ Generator. Everything else, llms.txt, the Markdown endpoints, crawler controls, Article schema, the Author Box, AI referral tracking, the freshness scanner and the WebMCP manifest, works with no key at all.

This subtab also holds the optional DataForSEO login and the read-only API Usage card, which shows calls, tokens and estimated cost.

Cloudflare, sub=cloudflare

One connect form, always visible whether or not RankReady detects Cloudflare in front of your site, because detection gives false negatives on staging and DNS-only zones. Paste an API token and RankReady manages a Cache Rule on that zone so your .md URLs, /llms.txt and /okf/ are not served from a stale cache. The token is stored the same way as an AI provider key, and the same storage disclosure is repeated on this screen rather than only on API Keys.

Headless API, sub=headless

Settings for the read-only REST API used by sites with a separate JavaScript frontend such as Next.js, Nuxt or Astro. The routes and the revalidation hook are served by RankReady Pro. The fields are:

• Public API, option rnrd_headless_enable. Off by default.
• Allowed origins, option rnrd_headless_cors_origins. Comma-separated. Empty allows any origin.
• CDN cache (seconds), option rnrd_headless_cache_ttl. Default 300.
• Rate limit (requests per minute per IP), option rnrd_headless_rate_limit. Default 120. Set 0 to turn the limit off.
• Revalidation URL, option rnrd_headless_revalidate_url. Since 1.4.1 it must be a public http or https address. A private, loopback or link-local address, or a host that does not resolve, is refused with a message and the previous value is kept.

Advanced, sub=advanced

The maintenance drawer. It holds Diagnostics, Error Log and Data Retention. The Bulk Summary and Bulk FAQ cards are RankReady Pro features and sit on the Summary and FAQ subtabs of AI Content. Generating one post at a time stays free and uncapped.

Delete all data on uninstall

Option name rnrd_delete_on_uninstall. Defaults to off, which means deleting the plugin leaves your summaries, FAQs and settings intact. Deactivating never removes anything either. Only when you switch this on before deleting does uninstall remove RankReady’s options, post meta, user meta and transients, drop the crawler log table, and remove the Cloudflare Cache Rule it created so nothing is left stranded on your Cloudflare zone.

Some cards in the admin are marked as RankReady Pro features. Their controls become usable once a Pro licence is active. A small number of cards are still genuinely unshipped, namely the AI mention tracker, per-language llms.txt and multi-site management.