TLDR Tech / Marketing
Your managed WordPress might be blocking AI bots and you can't see it
Some managed WordPress hosts may be silently blocking AI crawlers at the platform level, preventing sites from appearing in AI-generated search results. An investigation into one site hosted on WP Engine found that bots like ClaudeBot and GPTBot were receiving 429 rate-limit responses on cache-miss requests, while browser and Googlebot requests passed through normally. The block operates below both customer Cloudflare dashboards and WordPress security plugins, making it invisible to standard SEO audits.
Read the full story