Rank Math ability reference

What Rank Math needs before these load

2 of the 13 also ship in GoBuildWP Free 1.18.6 under the same names, marked “Also in GoBuildWP Free” below. They need no GoBuildWP Pro licence, but each retains its own dependency, feature and permission checks. Where Free's copy does less, its own description follows Pro's. When Pro's richer copy passes its gates, it registers first and answers.

Rank Math 1.0.200 or newer must be active; the gate compares the RANK_MATH_VERSION constant with that floor. The schema calls register when the rich-snippet module is enabled in the rank_math_modules option, the redirect calls with the redirections module, and the 404 log with 404-monitor, because those modules own the tables the calls read. Every call needs manage_options (super admin on multisite) through GoBuildWP's own permission check, and the redirect and 404 calls test manage_options again directly. With Rank Math inactive a call returns rank_math_not_active. The free plugin's post calls cover title, description and robots only, keep the noarchive, noimageindex and nosnippet tokens, and are gated on edit_posts and edit_post; the score, keywords and social fields are Pro's.

Minimum (base)

1.0.200 WPPILOT_PRO_RANK_MATH_MIN_VERSION

Rank Math editions

free

Agent skills shipped

rank-math-integration

A stored redirect is not always a served one

Rank Math builds its module manager after its setup wizard has been finished or skipped, or an account connected. Before that, its redirect classes still load and its table still accepts rows, so a create would appear to work while nothing ever redirects. The redirect calls look for the running Redirections module in that manager and, when it is absent, return rank_math_redirects_not_served with a message saying whether the wizard or the module switch is the cause.

Rank Math's model has two further traps. Its save quietly updates whichever active redirect already has a matching source instead of adding a row, so create checks first and refuses with rank_math_redirect_exists (409, carrying the existing id). Its database update resets any column it is not given to a default, such as status active and code 301, so edits are merged onto the stored row before saving. Exact sources are stored without their leading slash.

Trash, permanent delete and the ledger

Deleting moves a redirect to Rank Math's trash by default; permanent=true removes the row. Both need confirm=true, and without it the call returns wppilot_confirmation_required naming the source and target that will stop redirecting. Redirects live in the rank_math_redirections and rank_math_redirections_cache tables, so every redirect write is logged as irreversible; a trashed redirect is a status on that same row and is recovered in Rank Math's own screen, not through GoBuildWP.

Post fields are post meta (rank_math_title, rank_math_description, rank_math_robots as a list of tokens, rank_math_focus_keyword as a comma-separated string), so post SEO and schema edits restore with wppilot/rollback-change. Setting a schema type clears the post's existing rank_math_schema_ entries, their shortcode companions and the legacy rank_math_rich_snippet field before writing one primary entry. Term SEO is term meta, which the ledger's term snapshot does not hold, so those edits are marked irreversible.

Representative call sequence

This sequence describes the documented calls and checks to perform. It is not a recorded result from an installed WordPress site. Inspect returned errors and partial results, then verify the saved values and affected output before proceeding.

Turn the missing URLs visitors hit most often into redirects.

1. 01 wppilot/rank-math-list-404s Ordered by times_accessed, returns the logged URIs with hit counts, referrers and user agents, most-requested first.
2. 02 wppilot/rank-math-create-redirect Creates a 301 from a logged URI to its replacement page, or refuses with the id of an existing redirect that already covers that source.
3. 03 wppilot/rank-math-list-redirects Searched by the new source, confirms the row is stored and active. A stored row is not proof the redirect is served: request the old URI from outside the site (for example with curl -I) and check for a 301 whose Location is the replacement page.

Questions about Rank Math