FAQ
Frequently asked questions
About connecting your AI, plans, security, recipes and page building, and how Uncanny Automator works on your site. Uncanny Automator is an MCP server for WordPress with a built-in automation engine.
★★★★★ 4.9/5 on WordPress.org·40,000+ active sites·Automating WordPress since 2018
Works with
ChatGPT
Claude
Gemini
Copilot
Perplexity
and any AI app that supports remote MCP servers
Your AI
Connecting your AI
An MCP server is how AI apps such as ChatGPT or Claude connect to other software; MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard they use to do it. Yes, Uncanny Automator is one: an MCP server for WordPress with a built-in automation engine. It connects your AI to your WordPress site, so you can manage and automate the site with your AI.
No. Most people connect the AI they already pay for (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or any AI app that supports remote MCP servers). If you don’t have one, Uncanny Agent is built in. It does the same job as ChatGPT or Claude, just inside WordPress, and it’s free to start.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and any AI app that supports remote MCP servers. Setup guides for each are at mcp.automatorplugin.com.
Your AI connects to mcp.automatorplugin.com, which handles sign-in and setup and relays your AI’s requests to your site over an encrypted connection. Your content lives on your WordPress site. Your AI signs in with OAuth 2.1 and reaches only the sites you approve, and every action runs under your WordPress user’s own permissions. Making changes needs separate write access, and you can revoke access at any time.
The MCP server is how the AI you already use connects to your site. Uncanny Agent runs on the same server, for people with no AI subscription. Both are on every plan. Connect your own AI and it does the work; skip the subscription and Uncanny Agent does it instead.
Yes. Uncanny Agent is built into the plugin. Open it from your dashboard or at mcp.automatorplugin.com and start: no AI account, no keys, nothing to set up. It does the same job as ChatGPT or Claude, just inside WordPress.
If you don’t have a subscription to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another AI provider, or you prefer to use Uncanny Agent, all paid plans include more than enough Uncanny Agent usage for daily tasks. More details on usage
No. AI apps connect to several MCP servers at once. Add Uncanny Automator’s and the same AI gains the action library and recipes that keep running. If the other server was there for your plugins’ abilities, Uncanny Automator’s server runs those too.
From each server’s public plugin page, docs, code, pricing page and WordPress.org data, and from the NVD, Patchstack, WPScan and Wordfence vulnerability databases, as of Oct 19, 2026, and re-checked before we publish. Tell us if something changed and we will update the page.
Plans and billing
Free and paid plans
Yes. The MCP server ships in the free plugin on WordPress.org. You need a free Uncanny Automator account to connect, and the free plan allows up to 300 tool uses a day in your first week, then 150 a day forever. Paid plans have unlimited tool usage. See plans
Managing your site with your AI, up to 300 tool uses a day in the first week (150 a day forever), thousands of plugin abilities, 440+ actions across 138+ plugins and apps, and Lite recipes with 250 app credits for external app integrations.
Every action marked free in our library, 440+ of them across 138+ plugins and apps, plus reading your site, editing content, and building and publishing recipes. WooCommerce actions, creating users and running a whole recipe on demand are on paid plans.
No. The free plan needs a free account and nothing else.
The free plan includes up to 300 tool uses a day in your first week, then 150 tool uses a day forever, shared across your sites. Paid plans have unlimited tool usage.
A tool use is one thing your AI does on your site through Uncanny Automator. Ask it to publish a draft, add a customer to a course or post a message about the spring sale to Instagram, and it uses the right tool for the job: one job, one tool use. A bigger request can take several, because your AI may look a few things up first.
Your AI tells you, and the count refreshes the next day. Read how the free plan works
No. The MCP server is free, with 440+ actions across 138+ plugins and apps, recipe building and content editing. You get up to 300 tool uses a day in your first week, then 150 a day forever. Paid plans add unlimited tool usage, WooCommerce actions, user creation, running whole recipes on demand and the complete action library. Your AI tells you when something needs a paid plan.
Yes, at any time, by paying the difference. Discounted upgrades are not prorated and don’t extend the renewal date.
If you’re not happy, ask within 14 days of your first purchase and we’ll refund you, as long as you’ve barely used it. Refund policy in the terms
If you’re not ready to dive in, you can try the free version of Uncanny Automator. It includes a limited number of triggers and actions and 250 free credits to try out app integrations. Upgrade to a paid plan to unlock the full power of automation.
Security
Security and control
It is the hosted connection service. Your AI connects there, signs in, and its requests reach your site over an encrypted connection. Your posts, users and orders stay in your WordPress database. Read about security and control
An AI can only do what you let it. You approve every connection as an administrator, choose read-only or read-and-write, and can switch off any tool, integration, single action or ability for every connected AI. Raw database changes and deleting users are never available to any AI. Disconnect an app and its access stops immediately.
Yes. Connect an app read-only or read-and-write, and switch off any tool, integration or individual action for every connected AI. Raw database changes and deleting users are banned outright. Only administrators can connect an AI.
It acts as the administrator who approved the connection, with that administrator’s permissions. Only administrators can connect an AI.
Change the database directly, run a shell command, change a file, or delete a user.
No. Only you can change your switches.
It loses access right away. Everything it did stays: recipes keep running, pages stay published, settings stay set. It all belongs to your site, not to the app.
Yes, behind its own switch. Nothing is ever deleted or uninstalled, and WordPress core is never touched.
Recipes
Recipes and automations
A recipe is a workflow automation: a trigger, the actions that follow, and any conditions or queues you want. Recipes run the same way every time. Your AI can build one for you, or you can build it yourself in Uncanny Recipe Builder. Once published, a recipe runs on its own, with no prompt needed.
No. Once published, a recipe runs on its own triggers and schedules. AI is only involved when you ask it to build or change one, or when you add an AI step.
Uncanny Automator is an MCP server for WordPress with a built-in automation engine. Connect ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or any AI app that supports remote MCP servers, describe the workflow, and your AI saves the recipe as a draft you open in the builder.
Yes. The visual builder is still there, no code required, and every recipe opens in it, whoever built it.
Yes. Ask your AI to make it a recipe: a deterministic automation that runs the same way every time, with no AI in the loop.
Nothing changes. They keep running exactly as they do today, and you can keep building new ones by hand in the visual builder, with or without an AI.
Free covers plugin-to-plugin recipes, the visual builder, tokens, outgoing webhooks and logs. Paid plans add conditions, queues and scheduling, loops, the data tools, incoming webhooks, Magic Buttons and Links, and the wider set of app integrations, and differ by how many sites you connect. See plans
An AI step is an action inside a recipe that calls a model with your own provider key, to summarise, draft, translate, classify or write SEO fields. Its answer becomes a token for the next step.
Your own provider key for Claude, GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Mistral or Cohere. AI steps are available on the free plan.
No. A scheduled report is a recipe. Once published it runs on its own schedule, with no chat and no AI in the loop, unless the recipe has an AI step to write the summary.
The run is recorded in the recipe log step by step, so you can see which action failed and what it returned, rather than discovering it weeks later from a customer email.
Those run your automations in their cloud and price by task or operation volume, reaching into WordPress over an API. Automator runs WordPress automations inside WordPress, with native triggers and actions for the plugins you already use, and doesn’t meter plugin-to-plugin runs. For non-WordPress app-to-app work, Zapier and Make still cover far more services.
Yes. Uncanny Recipe Builder has a public PHP API, REST endpoints, WP-CLI support and base classes for custom triggers, actions and integrations. Developer docs
Integrations
Your plugins and apps
Yes. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, SureCart, WP Simple Pay and Stripe are all integrations, with triggers for orders, subscriptions, refunds and reviews. WooCommerce actions are a Pro feature.
Yes. LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, MemberPress Courses and LearnPress are all integrations, with triggers for enrollments, completions, quiz results and more.
Yes. MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, Wishlist Member, WooCommerce Memberships, ARMember and Memberium are all integrations, with triggers for the membership events that matter.
Yes. ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, Drip, Keap, FluentCRM and more are integrations, along with the social networks and forms plugins your campaigns run on.
Yes. Zoom Meetings and Webinars, GoTo Webinar, The Events Calendar, Events Manager, Modern Events Calendar, Amelia and Google Calendar are all integrations.
Yes. Help Scout and Fluent Support are integrations, along with the forms plugins your tickets come from and the channels your team uses, like Slack and WhatsApp.
Google Sheets and Airtable are the usual destinations, and a recipe can also email a report or post it to Slack. Any plugin with a trigger in Uncanny Automator can feed a report.
All WordPress plugins and apps along with their triggers and actions are listed on the All Triggers and Actions page. Automator also fully supports incoming and outgoing webhooks, which opens up support for thousands of additional apps. We are always adding new integrations and are happy to consider new integration requests from customers.
You can connect your AI to Uncanny Automator and automate many more site tasks, like building pages, analyzing data, building automations and more.
Getting your Thrive Automator automations up and running in Uncanny Automator involves recreating your Thrive Automator automations as recipes in Uncanny Automator. Uncanny Automator offers a simple, yet powerful GUI for building recipes (automations), so creating recipes is as easy as clicking to choose your triggers and actions, much like Thrive Automator. We’ve created a handy guide that outlines the differences between creating automations in Thrive Automator and recipes in Uncanny Automator. While recreating your automations, you’ll likely discover additional ways to leverage automation in your business, making the migration itself a valuable process.
Page Builder
Building pages
Your AI builds and updates pages in Gutenberg, Spectra, Elementor, Divi or WPBakery. No page builder? Uncanny Page Builder is built in.
No. Page building is one of the things your AI can do with Uncanny Automator, and it is included in every plan, including the free one. Plans differ by how many sites you connect and which addons you get. See plans
Yes, one page at a time. Keep your theme’s header and footer if you want, and leave the rest of the site untouched. When Page Builder adopts an existing page the original is saved automatically, so you can switch back at any time, same page, same URL.
No, and deliberately. Describing the page you want, or uploading a screenshot of one you like, replaces picking a template and then editing it into something else.
No. Page Builder can adopt an existing page and build a new design for it, but it does not convert the page’s existing block content. Page source can be exported and imported between sites.
Edits land on an unsaved draft, so the live page is untouched until you save. Every edit, yours or the AI’s, is undoable, adopting a page saves the original automatically, and a safeguard stops the AI overwriting an edit you just made.
Your page designs stay intact if the plugin is deactivated, because the output is clean HTML and CSS rather than proprietary shortcodes. Uninstalling never deletes your pages or content. Live content elements are the exception: they need Uncanny Automator active to render.
The plugin
Uncanny Automator on your site
For most sites, no. Very large sites with many complex recipes may see a small impact; collect only the data you need.
Everything tied to that recipe is deleted, including its trigger records, and it can’t be recovered. Records for other recipes that share a trigger are kept.
If the plugin was in a trigger, the recipe can no longer complete. If it was in an action, that action is skipped.
Many batch operations skip the normal plugin processes, so triggers that rely on them may not fire.
Do it with care on live recipes: users who completed only some triggers can get stuck. Replace a deleted trigger with one everyone can complete.
Yes. It was built with translation in mind and tested with translation plugins.
Yes. Multisite is supported on the Elite plan.
It can be, depending on the data your recipes capture and how you use it. Capture only what you need and tell your users.
If you were using Thrive Automator in your business, Uncanny Automator is the perfect next step. Automator adds tremendous value to any business using WordPress in minutes, by helping to automate the manual tasks involved in content, marketing, eCommerce, eLearning, memberships, reporting, webinars, customer support, and virtually anything else. This frees up your time to focus on growing your business. Many customers also use it to get unrelated WordPress plugins working together, replacing expensive and high-maintenance custom development.
Start by checking our Knowledge Base to see if your issue or question is covered. If you need additional assistance, send us a ticket from inside your account after purchase or use one of the contact forms on this site.
Tools and abilities
MCP tools and plugin abilities
A part of WordPress core since version 6.9 that lets a plugin register what it can do, ability by ability, with a name, a description, the inputs it takes, the output it returns and a permission check, so that software such as an AI app can discover and run those operations without guessing at the plugin’s screens. WordPress lists every registered ability in one place, and Uncanny Automator’s MCP server reads that list for your site.
153 plugins in the directory today, from WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Jetpack, Advanced Custom Fields and WPForms to Elementor, Spectra, FluentCRM, SureCart, LifterLMS and Amelia; the List of WordPress Abilities by Plugin is all of them, and it grows as plugins adopt the API. Uncanny Automator registers 25 abilities of its own. On your site, the plugin’s Abilities screen lists exactly what your plugins register.
No. Uncanny Automator includes 850+ actions (440+ free in Lite) across 250+ plugins and apps, built for each plugin and app whether or not it registers anything, plus reviewed native WordPress operations for posts, pages, media, menus, users and settings. Abilities add what the plugin itself knows how to do.
An ability is what a plugin registers about itself through the WordPress Abilities API, run by the plugin with its own permission checks. An action is Uncanny Automator’s own, built for each plugin and app whether or not it registers anything, callable by your AI on request and usable inside recipes. Actions extend the abilities available to a connected AI, so you can do even more with AI on your site.
For abilities, yes: the Abilities API lives in WordPress 6.9 and later. Uncanny Automator’s own actions, tools and recipes work on older WordPress too.
You do. Every ability has its own switch, and so does every tool, integration and single action; the switches apply to every connected AI app at once, and no AI app can change them. Each connected app is read-only or read-and-write and sees only the sites you allow, and the plugin that registered the ability still runs its own permission checks. Raw database changes, deleting users, shell commands and file changes are never available to any AI, Uncanny Agent included.
The plugin is free and abilities are free on every plan. On Lite your AI has 150 tool uses a day (300 a day in your first week), shared across all your connected sites; running an ability is one tool use. Paid plans have unlimited tool usage. Pro adds the actions marked Pro.
It is the WordPress abilities directory as of October 9, 2026, every plugin and every ability, re-read before each update of the list, plus the actions from Uncanny Automator’s live integrations feed. In your own wp-admin, the Abilities screen in Uncanny Automator lists what your site actually registers, which is what your AI sees.
Yes: 25 operations on WordPress 6.9 or later, under the automator/ namespace, covering recipes, triggers, actions, filter and queue blocks, loops, tokens, logs, posts, terms, plugins, users, roles, site context, content edits and custom fields. They are listed under Uncanny Automator in the List of WordPress Abilities by Plugin and described on the WordPress MCP Tools page.
You do. Each connected app is read-only or read-and-write and sees only the sites you allow. Every tool, every integration, every single action and every ability has its own switch, with one switch each for database access, site management and code and file reading. The switches apply to every connected AI app at once, and no AI app can change them; the site-management switch applies to Uncanny Agent too.
A tool is what your AI calls: one of the 16 operations on the WordPress MCP Tools page, published by the MCP server. An ability is what a plugin registers about itself through the WordPress Abilities API, run by the plugin with its own permission checks; Automator registers its own operations as abilities too (WordPress 6.9+). An action is Uncanny Automator’s own, built for each plugin and app whether or not that plugin registers anything, callable on request and usable inside recipes. The tools find and run the abilities and the actions (discover_ability finds an ability, run_ability runs it); the full list of both, by plugin, is on the List of WordPress Abilities by Plugin page.
Step-by-step guidance your AI loads for a specific plugin or task. Uncanny Automator ships 200+ of them, including guides for Yoast, Rank Math, WooCommerce, LearnDash, Wordfence, LiteSpeed Cache, UpdraftPlus, Fluent Forms, WPForms, ACF, Polylang and TablePress. Two hosted tools deliver them, search_skills and get_skill. A skill grants no permission, installs nothing and adds no tool.
Yes, read-only, with a switch of its own. The four database tools run SELECT queries capped at 100 rows, with password hashes and keys removed; nothing can be changed. On a network only a network administrator can grant it.
Yes, read-only, behind the code-and-file-reading switch. Your AI can inspect your site’s code and files to diagnose a problem, and verify WordPress core against the official checksums. It can never change a file, it never opens wp-config.php, keys or backups, and you choose what else it may never open.
Yes. prepare_media_upload opens an upload card inside ChatGPT or Claude; pick the file and it lands in the site’s Media Library as a real attachment, with the ID, filename and URL returned to your AI.
Uncanny Agent can today. Deleting users is never available to any AI.
Connect every site once. Each AI app sees the sites you allow, and new sites join automatically; remove a site from an app under Connected AI apps whenever you like. On Lite, 150 tool uses a day are shared across all your connected sites.
The free plugin includes every tool, every skill and 440+ actions; what a skill teaches can need Pro or the plugin it is about. Pro adds the actions marked Pro (WooCommerce actions, editing users, premium plugins and apps), the manual trigger behind run-recipe, and unlimited recipes between plugins and apps.
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