Getting Started

What RankReady does, and what it does not

A plain description of every RankReady feature, the things it deliberately leaves to your SEO plugin, and what it cannot promise.

Last updated August 25, 2026

Read this before you configure anything. It tells you exactly what RankReady adds to your site, what it deliberately does not touch, and what it is honestly able to claim. That should save you from expecting the wrong thing.

The short version

RankReady makes your existing WordPress content readable and fetchable by AI clients and crawlers. It publishes machine-readable versions of your content, gives you control over which AI crawlers may fetch it, and records what actually came and fetched. It is free, GPL-2.0, and made by Host My Blog.

The RankReady Dashboard tab showing the status of its features
The Dashboard shows which features are on.

Endpoints it serves

URL What it is
/llms.txt An AI-readable index of the site
/llms-full.txt The full corpus in one file
/{post-slug}.md Any post as clean Markdown with YAML frontmatter
/index.md The homepage as Markdown
/.well-known/mcp.json The WebMCP manifest
/okf/ An Open Knowledge Format bundle
/robots.txt A managed block between # BEGIN RankReady and # END RankReady

Distinct .md URLs always serve Markdown regardless of the Accept header. That is intentional, because a URL that changes its body based on a header is risky to cache. Negotiation happens on the canonical URL instead: Accept: text/markdown returns Markdown, text/html returns HTML, and an unsupported type returns 406. /llms.txt and /okf/ support ETag and return 304 on If-None-Match.

AI crawler control

You can allow or block 29 named AI crawlers individually, including GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, Applebot-Extended, Bingbot, Meta-ExternalAgent, FacebookBot, MistralAI-User, Bytespider, Amazonbot, cohere-ai, DuckAssistBot, YouBot, PhindBot, CCBot, AI2Bot, Diffbot and PetalBot.

You can also set the Content Signals directives ai-train, search and ai-input.

Googlebot and Facebook’s link crawler get their own mirrored group in robots.txt that repeats your existing User-agent: * rules. They are listed so scanners can see them by name. Their permissions are unchanged by this.

Content generation

Two features call an AI provider: AI Summaries and the FAQ Generator. You bring your own key for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini or DeepSeek. Generation is unlimited with no monthly cap, so the only cost is your own provider usage.

The FAQ Generator can optionally use DataForSEO to find real People Also Ask questions. That is optional, and it sends the focus keyword only, never your article text.

Schema

RankReady emits Article, Speakable, FAQPage and Person as JSON-LD. Person is the author box.

One behaviour catches people out, so it is worth stating plainly: Article schema requires a generated AI summary on that post. It builds its description from the summary and stops when there is none. A post with Article schema toggled on but no summary generated emits no Article JSON-LD. That is not a bug, it is the order of operations. Generate the summary first.

When Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress is active, RankReady merges into their existing schema graph through their documented filters instead of printing a second block. The verified result is that the Article count on the page stays at exactly 1.

Tracking

RankReady logs AI crawler activity and AI referrals, and it runs a freshness scanner over your content. All of that works with no API key.

Be careful how you read the numbers. A crawler hit proves your page was fetched. It does not prove it was quoted, cited or used in an answer. Treat the Insights tab as a fetch log, because that is what it is.

What RankReady does not do

  • It does not replace your SEO plugin. It runs alongside Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework and Slim SEO.
  • No title editor. Keep using your SEO plugin for that.
  • No meta description editor. Same.
  • No XML sitemap. Your SEO plugin or WordPress core handles it.
  • It does not rewrite your posts. Summaries and FAQs are stored separately, not injected into your post body.

What it cannot promise

RankReady makes your content crawlable, fetchable and parseable. It cannot make an AI system cite you, rank you, or send you traffic. No plugin can. Anyone claiming otherwise is guessing. What you get is a site that is easy for a machine to read, plus a log of what actually came and read it.

Not shipping yet

These appear as coming soon and are not available in 1.3.0. Do not plan around them:

  • Auto-generate on publish
  • Bulk regenerate
  • HowTo schema
  • ItemList schema
  • Custom post type support
  • AI mention tracker
  • Per-language llms.txt
  • Multi-site management

Requirements

Version 1.3.0 needs WordPress 6.9 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. It is tested up to WordPress 7.1.