Platforms · WordPress
Can AI agents buy from a WordPress site?
A WordPress site without WooCommerce has no catalogue for an agent to read, because it has no shop. Ottom recognises WordPress and says so plainly: this is a site an agent can read and not a store it can buy from. If you sell through a plugin other than WooCommerce, what an agent sees is whatever that plugin puts in the page.
How Ottom reads a WordPress catalogue
Source: pages, read one at a time. There is no catalogue endpoint to read, so Ottom reads the sitemap and the structured data on the pages it lists. Recognising WordPress is still useful: it is the difference between "no catalogue we can see" and "we know what this is, and it has no shop".
What works in your favour
- Content is text by default, so an agent can read what the site says about itself.
- Sitemaps are generated by core, so pages are discoverable without guessing.
Where agents tend to stop
- Without a commerce plugin there is nothing to buy, and a scan will say so rather than scoring a purchase it could not attempt.
- Page builders produce markup that looks fine and often carries no product structured data at all.
- Prices published in a table or a graphic are invisible, however clear they are to a reader.
Read about these first
- No machine-readable product feed
- Product pages have no schema.org markup
- Price is not readable without running the page
How often this happens on WordPress: not stated here. Ottom publishes frequency by retail category rather than by platform, so there is no per-platform figure to quote. The benchmark pages carry the category view, and publish one only once enough of its stores have been measured at every stage.
Questions
We sell through a plugin that is not WooCommerce. What then?
The scan reads your pages the way an agent would, so what matters is what the plugin puts in the markup. If it emits product structured data with a price and availability, an agent can evaluate you. If it renders those in the browser only, it cannot.
We are a brochure site. Is this relevant at all?
Less so, honestly. The parts that still apply are whether an assistant can describe what you do and find your contact and policy pages. The buy stage does not apply, and the report will not score you on it.
See this on your own WordPress store
We run the four stages above against your storefront and tell you which of these it actually hits. One free scan per store, per email address, every 30 days.