Tom Freeman

Markdown became the default output format for AI tools because it was token-efficient and easy to read without rendering. But a viral post by Thariq Shihipar, engineering lead for Claude Code at Anthropic, has ignited a serious debate: as AI agents grow more powerful and context windows expand to a million tokens, is Markdown holding us back?

Semantic HTML isn't just good practice, it's how AI systems identify, trust, and cite your content. Here's what we now check and why it matters.

The SiteVitals Monitor plugin records every WordPress update to your change timeline, so when something breaks, you know exactly what changed and when.

SiteVitals now analyses how well your content can be read and cited by AI systems. Here is exactly what each metric means, why it exists, and how to interpret your score.

A couple of changes went live this week that will improve how SiteVitals tracks and surfaces problems across your websites. On their own they might seem like small quality-of-life improvements. But they're part of a bigger picture, so I wanted to explain what changed and where we're heading.

For forty years, software quality was gated by who wrote the code. That assumption is dissolving — agents, marketers, and ops people are all shipping now, and human review can't keep up. Here's why the answer isn't slowing them down, and where the real governance layer is moving instead.

SiteVitals now monitors the status of individual services on your Linux servers — nginx, MySQL, Redis, PHP-FPM and more. Get alerted the moment a service stops or starts crash-looping, with full context captured at failure time.

SiteVitals now monitors your Linux servers — CPU, memory, disk, load average, and running processes. Install the agent in 60 seconds and get alerted before your sites go down.

A few weeks ago I wrote about "why technical SEO needs an AI layer" and walked through the schema validator, AI crawler audit, and llms.txt checker we had built into SiteVitals. The response was encouraging - but the most common question I got was some variant of: "My schema passes your checks, but I'm still not showing up in AI answers. What else can I do?"

When your site goes down, every minute matters—but not every alert should fire at once. SiteVitals now lets you set individual delays for each notification channel, so the right people are alerted at the right time. Notify your on-call developer immediately, escalate to managers if the issue persists, and keep leadership informed without unnecessary noise. It’s a smarter, more flexible way to handle incidents - automatically.

Monitor your scheduled tasks and background jobs with SiteVitals. Get alerted when a cron job fails to run, takes too long, or crashes.

If you’ve ever had a client’s site "go down," only to discover hours later that their IT department migrated their email and accidentally nuked their A record in the process, this update is for you. Today, we’re excited to announce Intelligent DNS Change Monitoring for SiteVitals. We aren’t just checking if your domain is "up" - we are now snapshotting your DNS and alerting you the second a record is added, removed, or modified.