MCP and the Agentic Web: Your WordPress Site as an AI Tool

MCP and the Agentic Web: Your WordPress Site as an AI Tool

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI agents discover and invoke capabilities on external systems. With WordPress 7.0's MCP adapter, your site isn't just readable by AI — it's callable.

What Is MCP?

MCP is to AI agents what REST APIs are to web applications. It defines a standardized way for AI systems (Claude, ChatGPT, custom agents) to:

  1. Discover what a system can do (list available tools)
  2. Understand the inputs and outputs (typed schemas)
  3. Invoke operations securely (with authentication and permissions)
  4. Receive structured responses

The WordPress MCP Adapter is the official bridge between WordPress's Abilities API and the MCP standard. When an AI agent connects to an MCP-enabled WordPress site, it learns: "This site can score content for AI readiness, convert pages to Markdown, extract FAQ sections, and generate site indexes."

From Pages to Capabilities

Traditional websites are collections of documents. Agentic websites are collections of capabilities.

Traditional Web Agentic Web
AI reads your page AI invokes your function
You publish content You publish content + capabilities
Passive: wait for crawlers Active: advertise what you can do
Output: HTML/Markdown Output: structured data via typed API
Discovery: sitemap.xml Discovery: MCP tool listing

This doesn't replace content — it augments it. Your pages still exist. But now an AI agent can also ask your site to do things with that content.

How It Works on WordPress 7.0

The chain is straightforward:

Plugin registers ability → Abilities API stores it →
MCP adapter exposes it → AI agent discovers and invokes it
  1. Your plugin calls wp_register_ability() with an ID, description, input/output schemas, and a callback function.
  2. WordPress Core stores the ability in the Abilities registry and makes it available at wp-json/wp-abilities/v1/.
  3. The MCP adapter (WordPress/mcp-adapter plugin) bridges the REST endpoint to the MCP protocol.
  4. An AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) connects, discovers available tools, and invokes them.

No additional configuration. Register an ability, install the adapter, and your site is agent-accessible.

Real-World Use Cases

Content Site (Blog / News)

  • get-summary: Returns a 100-word summary of any post
  • get-related: Lists posts related to a given topic
  • get-facts: Extracts key statistics and claims from a post
  • search-content: Semantic search across all published content

Why this matters: An AI assistant helping a user research a topic can pull from your site as a primary source — structured, verified, and attributed.

E-Commerce (WooCommerce)

  • find-products: Search products by attributes (price, category, features)
  • compare-products: Compare two SKUs across specifications
  • check-availability: Real-time stock status
  • get-recommendations: AI-powered product suggestions

Why this matters: AI shopping agents (Google AI Shopping, ChatGPT product search) can query your store directly instead of scraping product pages.

Knowledge Base / Documentation

  • search-docs: Find documentation by topic or error message
  • get-code-example: Return code snippets for a given API endpoint
  • check-compatibility: Verify version compatibility requirements
  • get-changelog: Return recent changes and updates

Why this matters: Developer AI assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) can use your docs as a live reference — more accurate than training data.

Security and Permissions

MCP capabilities aren't open to everyone. WordPress 7.0's permission model ensures:

  • Each ability has a permission_callback — you control who can invoke it
  • Authentication required — no anonymous invocation of privileged operations
  • Rate limiting applies — MCP invocations count toward your API limits
  • Read-only by default — abilities are readonly: true unless explicitly writable

This is critical: the agentic channel is for authorized integrations (site owner connecting their Claude account to their site), not for anonymous scrapers.

GEO Implications

MCP creates a direct channel for your content to be used by AI — bypassing the limitations of passive crawling:

  1. No crawl dependency — AI doesn't need to crawl your site to access your content. It invokes abilities directly.
  2. Structured output — Responses follow your defined schema. No parsing errors, no extraction guesswork.
  3. Real-time — AI gets your current content, not a cached index from weeks ago.
  4. Attribution built-in — Invocations are tracked. You know which AI systems use your content and how often.
  5. Differentiation — Almost no plugins register abilities yet. First-mover advantage is significant.

What Zitably Registers

The Zitably plugin registers four abilities that any MCP-connected AI agent can discover:

Ability What It Returns Use Case
zitably/get-markdown Clean Markdown of any post AI needs your content in efficient format
zitably/geo-score 7-axis GEO analysis AI evaluates content quality
zitably/enrich Extracted FAQ, stats, takeaways AI wants structured data from your content
zitably/llms-index Site-wide content index AI maps your available content

These are discoverable by any AI agent that connects to your WordPress 7.0 site via MCP.

Getting Started

  1. Update to WordPress 7.0 — The Abilities API is Core
  2. Install Zitably — GEO abilities register automatically
  3. Install the MCP adapter — WordPress/mcp-adapter from the plugin directory
  4. Connect your AI tools — Point Claude/ChatGPT to your site's MCP endpoint
  5. Monitor usage — Track which agents invoke which abilities

Your WordPress site just became a first-class participant in the agentic web.

Learn more about WordPress 7.0 Abilities → or get your GEO score →