Enable MCP tool access for AI agents

WordPress.com supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP). With MCP, you can use AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and others to interact with your WordPress.com sites, posts, comments, and settings.

This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce plans. For free sites, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs (large language models). By connecting your AI agent to WordPress.com, you can interact with your WordPress.com account and websites using natural language.

At a high level, here is how MCP connects your AI agent to WordPress.com:

1. You ask your AI agent to retrieve information from — or make changes to — your WordPress.com account or sites.
2. The AI agent uses an LLM to understand the request and determines that it needs to interact with WordPress.com. It checks for available MCP tools.
3. It finds the right MCP tool and asks for your permission to use it.
4. Once you give permission, the MCP tool completes the request — whether that is retrieving data (like your site stats) or performing an action (like publishing a post).
5. The LLM uses the result to generate its response or confirm that the action was completed.

MCP respects the user role permissions on your site. Access to specific MCP tools is restricted by the same permissions applied to your user role. For example, administrators have full access to all MCP tools, while editors can manage content and comments but cannot change site settings or plugins. Authors and contributors have more limited access. For the full breakdown of which tools are available to each role, see the MCP tool access table in the developer documentation.

The MCP server does not share any data with the AI model unless you explicitly choose to send it. It also does not use data from MCP tools to train AI models; the data is used once as part of the original request.

To turn on MCP access across all your sites, follow these steps:

1. Visit your account settings.
2. In the left sidebar, click “AI and MCP” (or go directly to wordpress.com/me/mcp).
3. Toggle the “Enable MCP access” switch to on.

Once enabled, the page displays three sections:

• Read: Controls which read tools your AI assistant can use (viewing posts, stats, settings, and similar). Shows how many are enabled.
• Write: Controls which write tools your AI assistant can use (creating, editing, and deleting content). Shows how many are enabled.
• Site exceptions: Lists any sites where MCP access has been individually disabled.

Below these sections, a “Connect external AI assistant” card provides instructions for connecting AI clients like Claude, ChatGPT, and others.

When MCP access is enabled, you can control which tools your AI assistant has access to by default. Click Read or Write on the MCP settings page to open the corresponding tool list.

Each list groups tools by category (for example, Sites, Posts, Pages, Design, and Account). To customize your tools, follow these steps:

1. Click Read or Write to open the tool list.
2. Use the “Enable all” toggle next to a category to turn all tools in that category on or off.
3. To be more selective, toggle individual tools within a category.
4. Click Back to return to the main MCP settings page.

These are your account-level defaults. They apply across all your sites unless a site has its own overrides configured (see Customize your site-level tools below).

Note: Write operations (including delete) request confirmation before executing. Deleted posts and pages can be recovered from trash for 30 days. Deleted media, categories, and tags are permanent.

You can disable MCP tool access for a specific site from your account settings. This is useful when MCP is enabled for all sites but you want to exclude one or more.

To disable MCP tools on a site, follow these steps:

1. Visit your account settings.
2. In the left sidebar, click “AI and MCP” (or navigate directly to wordpress.com/me/mcp).
3. Scroll to the “Site exceptions” section.
4. Select a site.

That specific site will not have MCP tools access. You can remove a site from the exceptions list with the Remove button next to the site name.

If you would rather not enable MCP across your entire account, you can enable it for individual sites instead.

Follow these steps to enable MCP for only a specific site:

1. Visit your account settings.
2. In the left sidebar, click “AI and MCP”.
3. Leave the “Enable MCP access” toggle off.
4. Click “Add to specific sites”.
5. Select the site you want to enable.

Once enabled, you can customize which tools are available for the site.

Site administrators can configure MCP tool access for an individual site. Site-level settings override account-level settings — if a tool is disabled at the site level, no user of that site can use it, regardless of their own account settings.

To access site-level MCP settings, visit your sites list, click the site, then go to Settings → “AI tools” (in the General section). Under External AI agent access, two options control which tools are available:

• Read: Per-tool toggles for read abilities, grouped by category.
• Write: Per-tool toggles for write abilities, grouped by category.

The Read and Write lists work the same way as the account-level tool pages: use the “Enable all” toggle for a category, or toggle individual tools.

A few things to know about site-level settings:

• Enabling MCP on a site: auto-enables all read tools and leaves write tools unset (disabled by default).
• Disabling MCP on a site: clears all site-level overrides, returning the site to account-level defaults.
• Site-level overrides take precedence: a tool disabled at the site level is unavailable to all users of that site, even if those users have it enabled in their account settings.

Once you have enabled MCP access, connect an AI client to start managing your WordPress.com sites with natural language.

WordPress.com is an official partner in the Claude Connectors Directory. You can connect Claude Desktop to your WordPress.com account in a few clicks — no manual configuration required.

Follow the steps in Edit your site with Claude to set up the connection.

You can connect ChatGPT to WordPress.com by creating a custom app in ChatGPT’s Developer Mode. This requires a ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, or Enterprise plan.

Follow the steps in Edit your site with ChatGPT to set up the connection.

You can connect any MCP-compatible client — such as Cursor, VS Code, Gemini, or Perplexity — to your WordPress.com account. Check your client’s documentation for how to add an MCP server, then use the following URL:

https://public-api.wordpress.com/wpcom/v2/mcp/v1

The OAuth 2.1 authentication flow automatically guides you through browser-based authorization when you first connect.

If your MCP connection stops responding, restart or reconnect the server in your AI client. The steps vary by application.

Once you have connected an AI client to your WordPress.com account, the assistant can access your WordPress.com sites through MCP tools. AI agents can do the following:

• View your site settings and configuration
• Check site statistics and traffic data
• Search and retrieve posts
• Review comments
• Check plugin status (administrators)
• View site users (administrators)
• Create, edit, and delete posts and pages
• Manage comments
• Organize categories and tags

You can ask your AI assistant questions like:

Explore and monitor:

• “Which of my sites gets the most traffic?”
• “Show me my latest posts.”
• “Suggest 10 new blog post topics to write about.”
• “Summarize recent comments on my blog.”

Create content:

• “Write and save a draft post about [topic] in my usual style.”
• “Create a new page called ‘About Me’ with a short bio.”
• “Add a new category called ‘[name]’ to my site.”
• “Create a tag called ‘[name]’ and add it to my latest post.”

Edit and update:

• “Update the title of my most recent post to [new title].”
• “Add an excerpt to my latest draft post.”
• “Change the status of my draft post ‘[title]’ to published.”

Manage comments:

• “Approve the pending comments on my blog.”
• “Mark the comment from [author] as spam.”
• “Delete the most recent comment on my site.”
• “Reply to the latest comment on my post ‘[title]’.”

Update media:

• “Update the alt text on my most recently uploaded image.”
• “Update the caption on the image titled ‘[name]’.”

Clean up content:

• “Trash all posts that have been in draft for over a year.”
• “Move my post ‘[title]’ back to draft from published.”

Take a look at more MCP prompt examples. Or, if you are interested in the full list of tools included in your connection, refer to our comprehensive MCP tools reference.