RankReady – AI & LLM SEO for ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AI

1.0.1 — 2026-05-27

Hotfix release on top of 1.0.0 — every fix you’d hit in the first week of running 1.0.0 in production.

• Homepage Markdown URL fixed. Sites using a static front page (Reading Settings → “A static page”) were emitting <link rel=”alternate” type=”text/markdown” href=”https://example.com.md” /> — that’s a different domain entirely (.md is the Moldova country TLD). Now correctly emits /index.md and resolves it back to the front-page post.
• AI Summary settings now save. The auto-generate, auto-display, position, label, heading-tag, custom-prompt, and post-types fields silently dropped on save because they were registered against the wrong settings group. Fixed at the source — options.php now whitelists every Content AI field correctly.
• WP-Cron diagnostic accepts external cron. No more false warnings on RunCloud / Kinsta / WP Engine / Pantheon (sites with DISABLE_WP_CRON=true running real system cron). The probe now measures whether scheduled events actually fire on time, regardless of which mechanism owns them. Up to 20 minutes overdue = healthy.
• Complex-cache content-negotiation fix. The fix for sites running behind Cloudflare, Varnish, Fastly, or any CDN that doesn’t vary cache key by Accept header. Cloudflare-CDN-Cache-Control: no-store auto-emitted on every markdown-eligible page request that specifies Accept: text/markdown. Markdown requests now bypass cache, reach origin, return correct content-type.
• Cloudflare APO auto-detect. When APO is detected and Markdown endpoints are enabled, RankReady surfaces a dismissible admin notice with the exact Cloudflare Cache Rule snippet to paste — applying it makes content-negotiated Markdown work without any cache buster.
• Cache headers audited to RFC 9110/9111 + enterprise CDN consensus. Removed Pragma (response-direction RFC violation). Added Expires: 0 for HTTP/1.0 proxies. Added Akamai-Cache-Control alongside legacy Edge-Control. Standardised to Title-Case everywhere. Added Vary: Accept-Encoding to every Vary header. Added ETag + If-None-Match → 304 on /llms.txt and /.well-known/mcp.json (60–90% bandwidth saving on revalidation). Split max-age vs s-maxage so browsers re-check often (cheap with ETag) while CDN edges cache longer. Added open CORS on AI-readable endpoints so cross-origin AI agents can fetch.
• UX polish. Removed the “Enable [feature]” intermediate button across 7 togglable cards (LLMs.txt, Markdown, robots.txt, Content Signals, WebMCP, Author Box, Schema Types). Users now tick the master toggle and hit Save — single conventional WordPress settings flow. Form rows breathe (16px row padding, 22px conditional-section margin, row dividers).

• Pro Extension API — rnrd_is_pro() is now filterable via apply_filters( ‘rnrd_is_pro’, false ). New do_action( ‘rnrd_loaded’ ) fires after every core class init. Companion Pro addons attach via standard WordPress hooks — no mu-plugin trick required.

• Build hygiene. Release zip now strips CHANGELOG.md, README.md, docs/, .wp-org-prefix and every VCS/IDE/OS dotfile via plugin/build-release.sh. Smaller zip, nothing dev-only reaches WP.org review.

1.0.0 — 2026-05-26

First public release — RankReady is live on WordPress.org.

Welcome! RankReady is the first WordPress plugin built end-to-end for the AI search layer — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Everything in this release is yours, free, with no caps on the core generators.

• Unlimited AI Summaries — generate “Key Takeaways” for every post via OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or DeepSeek with zero per-month limit on manual generation.
• FAQ schema generator — discover real user questions via DataForSEO, answer via your chosen LLM, output FAQPage JSON-LD that AI Overviews preferentially cite.
• llms.txt + Markdown endpoints — serve the llmstxt.org standard at /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, and every post as Markdown at /post-slug.md for AI agents.
• 31+ AI crawler controls — granular allow/block for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and 26 more, auto-synced to robots.txt.
• E-E-A-T schema + Author Box — Article, Speakable, and Author JSON-LD signals out of the box, designed to coexist with Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO without duplicate output.
• Content Freshness scanner — bucket posts into Stale / Going Stale / Fresh, bulk-refresh dateModified to signal recency to AI crawlers.
• Insights dashboard — Training Bots, Citation Bots, Real AI Referrals, and Content Fresh analytics with demo-data preview.
• Cache compatibility — first-class support for WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3TC, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Breeze, SG Optimizer, Hummingbird, Cache Enabler, Comet Cache, Swift Performance, NitroPack, Perfmatters, Cloudflare APO, Pantheon, Kinsta, WP Engine.
• Multilingual llms.txt — auto-detects WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot, GTranslate; emits hreflang Link headers.
• Diagnostics suite — 26 live endpoint probes, plugin-conflict detection, and copy-ready Apache/Nginx server-bypass snippets.

Welcome to RankReady! Feedback or questions? Visit store.posimyth.com/plugins/rankready.

For the full pre-1.0.0 development history, see CHANGELOG.md bundled with the plugin.