Is your WordPress site ready for AI search? What to check

Search engines are no longer the only systems reading your pages: AI answer engines read them too. Whether they may read your site, and how your pages can be used in their answers, is shaped by two things your site already serves: its robots.txt and the robots directives on each page. This guide covers what AI readiness means for a WordPress site, what to check, and how to check it.

What AI readiness means for a WordPress site

AI readiness here is not a score. Nobody can measure from inside your site how often an AI product cites it, so the audit reports facts instead: which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows or blocks, and which pages carry directives that limit how they can be used in AI answers. Every check reads what your site actually serves and cites the vendor’s own documentation.

Start with the AI access panel, free in every plan

Install PlugUpp Search & Social Appearance Audit from WordPress.org and run a scan. The Findings tab gains a row that is not a page, Site checks: robots.txt, AI access, favicon. Its AI access badge opens a panel listing every AI crawler the major providers document, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google, with:

• whether your robots.txt allows it, partly limits it or blocks it, with the exact robots.txt lines behind that verdict;
• what that crawler controls, in the provider’s own terms. OpenAI documents a GPTBot disallow as the do-not-train signal, while ChatGPT search visibility is controlled by a different token, OAI-SearchBot. Google documents Google-Extended as covering Gemini training and grounding only, with no effect on Google Search or AI Overviews;
• how far the rule reaches. ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User fetch a page because a person asked for it, and their providers document that robots.txt may not apply to those fetches, so a rule there is advisory.

The panel also reports whether an llms.txt file is present, as a fact rather than a recommendation, since no major provider is verified to consume it. And if your robots.txt answers with HTTP 404 while still serving rules, the Site row carries a warning in every plan: crawlers treat a missing robots.txt as no restrictions at all, so every rule in it is doing nothing.

AI readiness findings in the premium version

The AI readiness findings are in the premium version of the plugin, not the free one. They add the interpretive layer: findings scored by severity, in an AI area of the Findings tab, that read the same robots.txt as the panel plus the robots directives on every audited page. Each one cites the vendor’s own documentation.

On the Site row:

• AI search crawler blocked (warning): robots.txt disallows OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, each documented by its provider as the token that controls whether you are surfaced in that product’s answers.
• Blanket rule blocks AI crawlers (warning): a User-agent: * rule blocks the AI crawlers without naming them, so the site may be closed to AI search without anyone having chosen that.
• AI training opt-out detected (notice): GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended is disallowed. This is a common, deliberate choice and is reported neutrally, with its documented scope spelled out.
• CDN may block AI crawlers (notice): a known CDN was detected in your site’s response headers. Its bot rules sit upstream of robots.txt, so if AI visibility matters to you, check them in that dashboard too.

On each page:

• Snippets blocked for AI answers (warning): the page sets nosnippet. Google documents snippet directives as a direct input to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing documents that they may limit Copilot citation quality.
• Snippet length limits AI answers (notice): a very low max-snippet value, the same mechanism with a smaller effect.
• Opted out of Copilot answers (notice): the page sets noarchive, which Bing documents as the full opt-out from Copilot responses and grounding.
• Copilot limited to snippet (notice): the page sets nocache, which Bing documents as limiting Copilot to the page’s URL, title and snippet.

Every one of these can be a deliberate choice, and each message says so. The audit tells you the directive is there and what the vendor documents it as doing; whether it should be there is your call.

How to check AI readiness on your own site

1. Run a scan, open the AI access panel on the Site checks row, and confirm that each crawler’s verdict is the one you intended.
2. If the row warns that your robots.txt rules are likely ineffective, fix the server so robots.txt returns HTTP 200 before anything else.
3. With the premium version, filter the Findings tab by issue type and read each AI finding against what you meant. A blocked search crawler, or a blanket rule nobody chose, is the usual surprise.
4. After changing robots.txt or a page’s directives, press Re-scan on that row to confirm the result straight away.

Read the results as documented policy rather than proven crawler behaviour: providers document how their crawlers treat robots.txt, and that cannot be audited from your server. Rules at a CDN or firewall sit upstream of robots.txt, and Google’s Search Console opt-out for AI features leaves no signal on the page.

The AI access panel is free in every plan on WordPress.org. The AI readiness findings, scheduled scans and change tracking come with the premium version; plans and pricing are on the plugin’s page.