Agent-ready checklist for WordPress

Most agent-ready checklists are written for the machine you wish you had: a clean static site with perfect markup. Yours is a real WordPress install with a theme, a page builder, an SEO plugin, and a few years of posts. This checklist is for that site.

The goal is not perfection. It is to close the specific gaps that stop an AI engine from reading what you do, who you serve, and what each page answers.

This is for the WordPress owner who wants a concrete list, not a lecture.

Before the checklist: what agent-ready means here

Agent-ready means an AI engine can do three things with your site: fetch it, understand what each page offers, and surface it when someone asks a relevant question.

Every item below removes a reason one of those three fails. None of them promises a citation, because no honest checklist can. They make you readable. Whether an engine recommends you is its call, not yours.

The checklist

1. Crawlability: can the engine even fetch you

Start here, because everything else is moot if the page never loads for a machine.

• robots.txt does not block AI crawlers you want to reach.
• No meta robots noindex on pages you want read.
• Key content is in the HTML, not injected only after script runs.
• Pages return fast and do not hide behind an interstitial.

2. Structure: can the engine section the page

• One H1 per page.
• H2 for main sections, H3 nested inside, no skipped levels.
• Headings name the literal question the section answers.
• The direct answer sits in the first sentence under each heading.

3. Readable facts: is the meaning in text

• Value proposition is real text, not baked into a hero image.
• Pricing, hours, location, and contact are text a machine can read.
• Proof like badges and testimonials has a text equivalent.

4. Schema: can the engine describe the page

• Organization schema on the site with name, logo, URL, location.
• Article schema on blog posts with author and dates.
• FAQ, HowTo, Product, or LocalBusiness structure where the page actually contains it.
• One clean graph, not duplicate blocks from competing plugins.

5. Upkeep: does it stay ready

• Re check after publishing or editing.
• Re check after a theme or builder change.
• Treat readiness as a state you maintain, not a box you ticked once.

Old way versus new way

The old way ran the checklist once, called the site done, and moved on. Six months later a redesign stripped the text a machine relied on and nobody noticed.

The new way treats the last section as the real one. Your content keeps changing and the engines keep changing how they read. A page that passed in one quarter can fail the next without you touching it. So you re check, not re launch.

The damaging admission

This checklist will not help a three page brochure site for a local shop very much, and running four engine scans on it every week is overkill. We will say so rather than sell you upkeep you do not need.

It earns its keep when your business depends on being found and recommended and you keep publishing pages that need to stay readable. And completing every item still does not guarantee a citation. It removes the reasons an engine cannot read you, which is the honest version of the promise.

Where Citedon fits

You can do most of this by hand. The schema and graph work is where a connected tool saves real time on WordPress. Citedon's scan reads your pages the way the four engines do and shows you which checklist items pass and which fail.

Where it applies the missing layer, that is WordPress only, additively, through the connected plugin with per fix approval, merged into the graph your SEO plugin already emits. It works with Yoast and Rank Math and does not fight them. On other platforms the scan still diagnoses you and you apply the changes yourself.

Run the whole checklist automatically. Run a free scan on your most important page and read which items pass across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.