The Agentic Web Is Coming — Is WordPress Ready?

AI agents don’t browse the web the way humans do. They need to read it, query it, take actions on it. A new layer of the web is being built right now – one where sites aren’t just destinations for human visitors but interfaces that AI systems can interact with directly. WordPress, which already powers 43% of the web, has a real structural role to play here. But it requires the ecosystem to think differently about what a WordPress site actually is.

In this talk I dig into what the agentic web actually means in practice – what agents need from a site, how MCP and the WordPress AI infrastructure being built in core (WP AI Client, MCP Adapter, Abilities API) fit in, and what developers, agencies, and site owners should be thinking about now before this shift accelerates.

Transcript

1. The Agentic Web Is Coming — Is WordPress Ready? Miriam Schwab · Head of WordPress, Elementor WordCamp US 2026
2. Cloudflare Radar Analytics 57% of web traffic is now bots, not humans Cloudflare Radar, June 2026 18 months ahead of forecast 51.8% AI Training Crawlers 9.3% Search & Retrieval
3. 68% of US Google searches ended without a click Jan–Apr 2026, up from 60% in 2024 1 Billion Google AI Mode Users Monthly active user base surpassed 1 billion in early 2026. Doubling Query Growth Rate Query volume is doubling every quarter as user adoption accelerates.
4. 41% of the web runs on WordPress WordPress Scale So whatever is happening with agents is happening at WordPress scale.
5. What does agent-ready mean? 📖 🔍 ⚡ READ QUERY ACT
6. "Why should I bother, if it just means AI will take my stuff?"
7. 0 1 Relevance. Being unreadable doesn't protect your content from being used. It mostly means being absent from where people now get their answers.
8. 0 2 miriamschwab.me/robots.txt It’s not all-ornothing Allow: /wp-json/miriamschwab/v1/contact Disallow: /wp-json/ User-agent: ClaudeBot Allow: / search=yes ai-input=yes ai-train=no allow/disallow Robots.txt with Content-Signal highlighted
9. Agent-ready doesn't mean open season. It means you're the one setting the terms, instead of being invisible
10. What technically makes a site agent-ready?
11. specification.website
12. 01. STABLE URLS Ensures cached agent answers and references stay valid. 02. STRUCTURED DATA (JSON-LD) 06. MACHINE READABLE FEEDS Utilizes XML sitemaps, RSS, and JSON feeds for indexing. 07. MCP SERVER ENDPOINTS Extracts clean entities and metadata without guessing. Model Context Protocol endpoints to securely run site tools. 03. SEMANTIC HTML 08. MARKDOWN ENDPOINTS Prevents theme and navigation markup from polluting content. Clean, per-page markdown formats optimal for LLM contexts. 04. ROBOTS.TXT POLICY Names AI crawlers explicitly for unambiguous access terms. 09. WEBMCP STANDARDS Browser-native client tools using modelContext API. 05. LLMS.TXT INDEX 10. ACTIVE DISCOVERY Curated, high-priority markdown content map (emerging). Leverages Agent Skills & HTTP Link headers for easy lookup.
13. Agent-readiness becomes an MCP-driven loop 01 02 03 04 Read the standard Read my site Find the gap Fix it What the site actually does today, over MCP Adapter. Required versus present. The step that used to need me. Written back through the same connection that read it. discover-abilities diff rest-write The checklist, machine-readable. get_checklist
16. WP AI plumbing gives us the tools 01 02 03 Abilities API MCP Adapter WP AI Client registers what a site can do exposes it to outside agents lets WordPress consume AI itself
17. Examples of Abilities core/get-site-info yoast-seo/get-seo-scores miriamschwab/get-posts make-my-site-agent-ready/set-endpoi nt miriamschwab/create-post miriamschwab/activate-plugin miriamschwab/preview-post-update angie/ask-for-snippet-details miriamschwab/get-categories angie/block-requirements
18. Read my site & fix AI Coding Agent MCP + Abilities Initiates and drafts system changes MCP Protocol MCP Adapter Translates capabilities into tools Agent Automation An agent makes the changes over MCP Adapter WordPress Core Executes actions via Abilities API
19. Wait, I’m letting an agent loose on my site? Hard-blocked regardless of confirmation: These are strict, code-level safety boundaries that cannot be bypassed by prompts.  any write to /wp/v2/users  DELETE on /wp/v2/plugins  any write to /wp/v2/settings  and any force=true — from miriamschwab/rest-write
20. WP AI Client: the other direction WordPress Outbound AI Instead of external agents calling in, WordPress itself initiates calls to AI providers. Bundled natively in WP 7.0 core.
22. Same post. Same words. 15x less to read. Raw HTML (/) 78 KB Markdown (.md) 5.6 KB Theme markup, scripts, ads The actual article content miriamschwab.me/how-i-improved-by-my-sites-ai-readiness-score-from-51-to-86 · .md vs / · measured 2026-08-12
24. isitagentready.com - before and after
25. But…?
26. Agents are ready! They work with the web as it is.
36. What was going on? My form endpoint was exposed in three places:    A curated index file specifying rules and resources for LLMs. An api-catalog document outlining available endpoints. A structured index describing capabilities and schemas. llms.txt API Catalog Yet the LLMs were totally ignoring it! Agent Skills
37. // KEY INSIGHT Claude takes content very seriously. My testing led me to a clear conclusion. So I updated my Contact Page to tell it: this form has an API endpoint.
38. Agent-readiness checklist 21 Checklist Items Only one is strictly required (stable URLs). The other 20 are recommended or optional. specification.website
39. It makes your site better overall Stable URLs The single absolute prerequisite for any crawler or agent. The foundation of traditional web hygiene. Clean Semantics Valid, semantic markup built first for human accessibility—which translates for AI parsers. Structured Data Clean Markup Explicit JSON-LD schemas that allow search engines and agents to query structured facts directly. Delivering actual content without burying it inside heavy theme elements, scripts, or intrusive ads. Bots want what humans want.
40. Agent readiness is human readiness The Core Principle “The pages that win in agent answers are the ones that are easy to fetch, easy to parse, and easy to trust.” Strategic Alignment “Most of these also benefit traditional SEO and accessibility. Agent readiness rarely conflicts with the rest of the spec; it just raises priority.” Common Mistakes 1. Treating agent readiness as separate from SEO/accessibility. 2. Writing for the model rather than the reader.
41. Keep an eye on it anyway isitagentready.com Bing Webmaster Tools Pagespeed Insights
42. Is WP ready? Core is Ready Ecosystem Isn't The fundamental plumbing works. The platform exposes local site abilities and translates capabilities into clear, structured endpoints. Independent plugins have yet to adopt and register their abilities, leaving the space empty on almost every site running their code.
43. Abilities on miriamschwab.me Total Abilities 81 Core 6 Plugins 75
44. The number that matters isn't 81. It's who wrote them — the independent ecosystem is still empty. Miriam Schwab (Me)40 Independent Ecosystem 2 Elementor (Angie)31 WordPress Core8 Abilities registered The entire third-party plugin contribution comes from a single plugin (Yoast). Almost nobody has built here yet. Yoast SEO2 Everyone else (Site Kit, Migration, etc.)0
45. You don’t have to build this from scratch miriamschwab.me/plugins go.elementor.com/angie-wcus
46. The Agentic Era WordPress is 23 years old. Yet we’re at a greenfield stage again.
47. Embrace your Abilities 😉 Thank you! Miriam Schwab miriamschwab.me