Version: 1.0.14
Last updated: March 2026
Audience: Clients, stakeholders, and non-technical decision-makers
ITS Presence Engine is the structured data and discoverability layer for ITS Group websites. It automatically generates everything search engines and AI systems need to deeply understand a site — who the business is, what it offers, where it is, what events are happening, and what people have said about it — and embeds that information in every page, invisibly, in a format that machines can read.
Think of it as the site's translator: taking the business's real-world identity and turning it into a precise, machine-readable description that search engines and AI systems can use directly.
Search engines and AI systems don't understand web pages the way humans do. They need structured, unambiguous data to determine whether a business deserves to appear in rich results — star ratings in search, event listings, FAQ boxes, business profiles, and AI-generated summaries. Most WordPress sites either have no structured data at all, or rely on generic SEO plugins that produce superficial output full of gaps.
At the same time, the emerging ecosystem of AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) is increasingly drawing on web content to answer questions about local businesses, venues, and events. Sites without properly structured, machine-readable content simply don't appear in these answers.
Every page on the site receives a complete, deeply detailed JSON-LD graph — embedded invisibly in the page <head>. This graph describes the full picture:
- The organisation: legal entity, brand, founders, certifications, payment methods, shipping policies, contact points
- The local business: type, location, opening hours, aggregate star rating, accepted payment methods, return policy
- The place: GPS coordinates, tourist destination classification, nearby places with travel times
- Current events: dates, ticket availability, venue, descriptions — drawn from both the site's own data and live Facebook events
- Reviews: structured review nodes from Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, and TrustPilot — updated nightly by ITS Themer
- Every page: web page type, breadcrumbs, navigation structure, FAQ questions and answers (extracted automatically from the page content), images
- Articles: structured blog posts with author, dates, and categorisation
This graph is consumed by Google, Bing, and AI systems. It is the foundation for rich results — star ratings, event cards, FAQ boxes, and business knowledge panels in search.
Alongside the JSON-LD, the plugin manages all HTML <head> meta elements: canonical URL, Open Graph tags (for social sharing previews), Twitter Cards, and article timestamps. These are generated from the site's INI configuration, not from WordPress fields, so they are consistent and never missing.
A fully custom XML sitemap with image extensions — listing every page, post, and supporting file (favicons, manifests, llms.txt, security.txt, KML location file). The sitemap automatically notifies Google and Bing when content changes. It replaces WordPress's built-in sitemap entirely.
A growing number of AI systems look for llms.txt at the root of a website — a plain-text index that tells AI tools what the site is about and where to find clean, readable content. ITS Presence Engine generates:
llms.txt— an index of every page with its description and a link to its markdown version- One markdown file per page (
/assets/markdown/{slug}.md) — scraped from the live HTML, clean and formatted for AI consumption
These files are regenerated automatically whenever content changes, and on a daily schedule.
/.well-known/security.txt — the standardised file that tells security researchers how to report vulnerabilities. Required under emerging compliance frameworks and increasingly expected of professional web presence. Generated from the site's contact details, RFC 9116 compliant, renewed automatically every week.
Everything is driven by plain INI files — no database, no WordPress settings pages for content data. This means:
- Version-controllable: changes to business information can be tracked in Git
- Portable: configuration can be copied between sites and environments
- Auditable: a non-developer can read and verify the configuration
Key INI files:
| File | What it controls |
|---|---|
content.ini |
Organisation details, business data, place info, social profiles, security contact |
page-meta.ini |
Per-page title, description, keywords |
graph-config.ini |
Which schema modules are active; service tier |
event-one-off.ini |
One-off event definitions |
nearby.ini |
Nearby places with distances and travel times |
affiliations.ini |
Business affiliations and endorsements |
graph-config.ini defines a service tier that controls which schema modules are emitted:
| Tier | What's included |
|---|---|
lite |
Organisation and address nodes only — minimum viable presence |
standard |
All core modules: business, place, hours, events, reviews, navigation |
premium |
Full graph — all modules including images, person nodes, creator attribution, Schema Cloud connection |
This allows ITS to deploy the plugin across sites of different complexity levels from a single codebase, with per-site configuration controlling scope.
The Schema Cloud is a planned shared graph network. When a site is at premium tier and passes the ITS Day-3 quality validation, its graph is automatically pushed to the Schema Cloud on every page render — making the site's structured data accessible as a service to other consuming applications via the REST API.
The REST endpoint is live now:
GET /wp-json/its-pe/v1/schema/{slug}
Returns the full JSON-LD graph for any page slug, with a one-hour cache header. This is already usable by ITS tools (Schema Visualiser, Schema Explorer) to inspect and validate the site's graph without re-rendering the page.
A dedicated admin area provides:
- Graph Preview — browse the generated JSON-LD for any page, see node types at a glance, validate structure, refresh the snapshot, and open it in the ITS Schema Visualiser
- INI Editor — edit all site configuration files directly in the admin, with tabbed section navigation
- Graph Config — toggle individual schema modules on/off, set service tier, configure Schema Cloud
- Nearby & Affiliations — edit proximity and affiliation data with real-time geocoding (powered by OpenStreetMap Nominatim) and travel-time calculation (powered by OSRM)
- LLMs — trigger immediate regeneration of
llms.txtand all page markdown files - Security.txt — trigger immediate regeneration of
security.txt - Logs — debug and monitoring access
Three categories of content update automatically without any manual intervention:
| What | How often | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
llms.txt + page markdown |
Daily + on post save | WP-Cron + save_post hook |
security.txt |
Weekly | WP-Cron |
| Review and event data | Nightly (via ITS Themer) | ITS Themer social cron feeds SocialDB |
ITS Presence Engine is the structured data layer of a three-plugin stack:
- ITS Themer — The visual and CSS/HTML delivery layer. Runs the nightly social feed cron that populates the reviews and events data used by the Presence Engine's schema.
- ITS Access Gate — Protects development and staging environments behind a password gate, with automatic pass-through for logged-in WordPress users.
Together the three plugins form the complete ITS Framework delivery stack: presentation, access control, and discoverability.