Romulus Labs Content Publisher for Rankwise

Description

This plugin connects a WordPress site to Rankwise, a service that helps a site get found and cited by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.

This plugin is the WordPress end of that service. It needs a Rankwise account: without one it does nothing and sends nothing.

Once you connect the site, you can:

• Publish articles. Articles you approve in Rankwise arrive as WordPress posts or pages, with their title, excerpt, slug, categories, tags and hero image. Re-publishing an article updates the same post instead of creating a duplicate. Elementor sites can have the Elementor edit flags set for them.
• Apply AI-visibility fixes (optional, off by default). Rankwise proposes fixes for your pages, such as structured data (JSON-LD), head tags, robots.txt lines and an llms.txt file. If you switch this on and paste your delivery secret, the plugin downloads the fixes you approved, checks their signature, and adds them when pages are served. If anything fails, your site renders exactly as it did. Not available yet: Rankwise has not switched on fix delivery for accounts, so today Rankwise shows you each proposed fix and its exact change, and this setting has nothing to download until delivery opens.
• Ping IndexNow when you publish (optional, off by default). Sends the URL of a post you publish or update to IndexNow, so Bing, Yandex and other participating engines re-crawl it sooner.
• Report AI-crawler visits (optional, off by default). Counts visits from AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot and sends Rankwise a daily summary, so you can see whether the AI engines are actually reaching your pages.

Nothing is sent anywhere when you install or activate the plugin. The plugin shows no ads, adds no links or credits to your public site, and has no locked or paid features of its own: every feature in the plugin works for every connected account.

How publishing is secured

Each connected site gets its own API key and shared secret. Every request Rankwise sends to your site is signed with an HMAC-SHA256 signature over the exact request body, and the plugin refuses any request whose key or signature does not match. Only the two routes the plugin registers (rankwise/v1/articles and rankwise/v1/media) accept these requests, and the media route accepts image files only.

External services

This plugin connects to services outside your WordPress site. Here is each one, what it is used for, what is sent, and when.

Rankwise (tryrankwise.com)

Rankwise is the service this plugin belongs to, run by the company named on the Rankwise legal notice.

• When you click Connect with Rankwise: your browser opens https://tryrankwise.com/dashboard/integrations/connect/wordpress with this site’s address, the address of the plugin screen to return to, and a one-time security code. Rankwise sends your browser back to the plugin screen with a connect token, and the plugin then connects as described in the next point.
• When you connect the site (with Connect with Rankwise, or by pasting a connect token and pressing Connect Site): the token, this site’s address, the site title, a random site ID created by the plugin, your WordPress user ID and email address, the plugin version, and whether Elementor is active are sent to https://tryrankwise.com/api/wordpress/sites. Rankwise returns the API key and shared secret the site uses from then on.
• When you press Test Connection: a request with no plugin data is sent to the same address to check it can be reached.
• When you disconnect: a signed request with an empty body tells Rankwise to forget the connection.
• When Rankwise publishes to your site: Rankwise calls your site, not the other way round. The plugin replies with the new post ID, its URL and its status.
• Only if you switch on AI-visibility fixes: when a page is served, at most once every five minutes, the plugin requests your fixes from https://tryrankwise.com/api/remediation/bundle, sending only your site’s domain name.
• Only if you switch on AI-crawler reports and the site is connected: once a day, the plugin sends https://tryrankwise.com/api/integrations/crawler-telemetry a summary of AI-crawler visits: the crawler name, the date, the number of visits and the most visited paths. Visits by people are never counted, and no IP addresses, cookies or personal data are recorded or sent.
• Updates: this copy of the plugin is updated through WordPress.org, not through Rankwise.

Like every request WordPress makes, each of these carries WordPress’s standard user agent, which includes your WordPress version and site address.

Rankwise terms of service and privacy policy.

IndexNow (api.indexnow.org)

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site tell participating search engines (including Bing and Yandex) that a URL has changed.

• Only if you switch on IndexNow: when you publish or update a public post, its URL, your site’s host name and your site’s IndexNow key are sent to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow. The plugin also serves the key as a small text file at /<key>.txt on your site, which is how IndexNow checks that you own the site.

IndexNow terms of use, which include its privacy provisions, and documentation.