MACHINE 404 / Platforms

Is your WordPress site readable by AI?

Usually half of it, by accident. WordPress and its plugins emit a good deal of structured data without anybody asking, which is why WordPress sites often score in the middle rather than at the bottom. The missing half is always the same half, and it is the half that carries the money.

What the platform already gives you

An SEO plugin usually produces a title, a description, a canonical, an OpenGraph card and a sitemap. WooCommerce emits Product markup with a price on product pages. That is a genuine head start, and it is why a WordPress shop rarely starts from zero.

Shopify goes further and ships an endpoint an agent can transact against, which most stores simply leave switched off. Turning it on is a setting, not a project.

What is almost always missing

The entity. A plugin describes pages; almost nothing describes the company: legal name, contact point, area served, and the profiles that let a machine confirm you are one business and not three similar ones. That is the heaviest identity check in the rubric and the one most sites fail outright.

Then the service prices. Product markup covers a shop; a service business with prices in a table, a PDF or an image has an offer no machine can read, which is the single heaviest check there is. And the AI crawler policy: most sites have never made that decision, so it was made for them by silence.

The part that keeps happening after you fix it

Structured data disappears silently on theme updates and plugin migrations. Nothing warns you, no dashboard turns red, and the first symptom is fewer enquiries six weeks later. That is the whole argument for a monthly re-scan, and it is also why a one-off fix is worth buying only if somebody measures it again later.

Shopify, and custom sites

Shopify starts higher: product data is structured by default and there is an agent endpoint waiting to be switched on. What it still misses is the entity and the policy, exactly like WordPress. A custom site starts wherever its developer left it, which in practice means either very high or close to zero, with little in between.

If your platform genuinely cannot get there, we say so and quote a rebuild separately rather than charging you for a report that ends in a shrug.