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Rank Math MCP from the 404 log to a working redirect

This Rank Math MCP integration covers the loop most sites need: find missing URLs in Rank Math's 404 Monitor, point them somewhere with a redirect, and fix titles, descriptions, robots and schema on the pages that remain. Post SEO and schema writes are undoable. Term SEO and redirects are not, because they sit in term meta and Rank Math's own tables, and site settings stay read-only. GoBuildWP Free handles one post's title, description and robots; the 404 Monitor, redirects, schema and term SEO are Pro.

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Show me the ten most-hit 404s from Rank Math and redirect the old /services/seo-audit/ URL to /seo-audit/.

  1. wppilot/rank-math-check-setupRead

    Confirms the 404 Monitor and Redirections modules are on and redirections_served is true.

  2. wppilot/rank-math-list-404sRead

    Ordered by times_accessed, returns each missing URI with hits, last access, referrer and user agent.

  3. wppilot/rank-math-list-redirectsRead

    Searches existing sources so an exact duplicate is caught before anything is created.

  4. wppilot/rank-math-create-redirectWrite

    Creates a 301 through Rank Math's Redirection model; refused if another redirect owns that exact source or the target equals the source.

Proposed sequence from source declarations; not a recorded task or proof of client compatibility. Inspect saved state and browser or provider results separately.
Edition
Free 2 + Pro 11
Abilities
13
Requires
WordPress 6.9+, PHP 8.0+, Rank Math 1.0.200+

Abilities

Rank Math abilities by effect

Inspect7

Create and change4

Destructive2

Reference: /docs/reference/rank-math

Documented source abilities; live registration can be narrower. Edition and effect labels describe the source catalogue. The installed schema, dependency versions, licence, WordPress capability, safety profile and per-ability policy determine availability; labels alone do not prove confirmation or recovery.

Rank Math's own AI tools

Rank Math's own MCP tools next to GoBuildWP's

Rank Math publishes an MCP server of its own. The tools are registered on the site and served at the MCP Adapter's default endpoint; a desktop app such as Claude Desktop, ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot reaches them through OAuth or through Automattic's mcp-wordpress-remote package, run with npx, so the setup guide asks for Node.js. The hand-written config signs in with an application password you can revoke from your profile. It runs on the free plugin; competitor audits need PRO and the AI Visibility tools a Content AI plan.

Its strength is site-level work: a full SEO audit plus fix-site-seo to repair failed tests, on-page analysis of one post, SEO scores, link reports, Search Console keywords, and setters for website identity, homepage SEO, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, modules and post-type defaults. In its published tool list, post meta, post schema and redirects appear only as reads, and the docs say nothing about reverting a change.

GoBuildWP's Rank Math abilities cover the opposite half: they write post and term titles, descriptions and robots, set a schema type, read the 404 Monitor, and create, update or trash redirects, while site settings stay read-only. Post SEO and schema edits are snapshotted, so rollback-change restores them; term SEO and redirect writes are logged as irreversible. That connection also serves the site's other plugins, under one safety profile and ledger.

Worked example

Turn the busiest 404s into redirects

Expected outcome to verify on the installed stack; this sequence has not been recorded as a runtime test.

The user sees which dead URLs draw the most traffic, and one of them now lands on a live page. The redirect is logged as irreversible; removing it later goes through delete-redirect, which trashes by default and needs confirm.

Validate the actual HTTP status and Location after redirect readback. Follow the destination chain deliberately to detect cycles; the saved redirect row alone does not establish public behavior.

  1. rank-math-check-setup

    Confirms the 404 Monitor and Redirections modules are on and redirections_served is true.

  2. rank-math-list-404s

    Ordered by times_accessed, returns each missing URI with hits, last access, referrer and user agent.

  3. rank-math-list-redirects

    Searches existing sources so an exact duplicate is caught before anything is created.

  4. rank-math-create-redirect

    Creates a 301 through Rank Math's Redirection model; refused if another redirect owns that exact source or the target equals the source.

Data model

Post meta, term meta and Rank Math's tables

Per-post SEO is ordinary post meta, including a robots token array in which index and noindex exclude each other and an empty value means inherit the post-type setting. The abilities expose that as default, index or noindex so a contradictory set is never written. Term SEO is ordinary term meta. Site settings are shared rank-math-options- options, readable through get-settings and changed only by merging with execute-php.

Redirects are rows in rank_math_redirections, with a rank_math_redirections_cache table beside them, and the 404 Monitor logs to rank_math_404_logs. Rank Math's own update resets any column it is not given, so update-redirect merges the stored row first.

One trap: until Rank Math's setup wizard has been finished or skipped, its redirections module does not run, and a redirect saved then is stored but never served. check-setup reports redirections_served, and create-redirect refuses with the fix.

Limits

Rank Math boundaries

  • In GoBuildWP Free, rank-math-edit-post-seo sets only the title, description and robots index and follow, keeps the post's noarchive, noimageindex and nosnippet tokens, and restores just the Rank Math keys it wrote. Focus keywords, canonical, social fields, the score and everything in the example above need Pro.
  • Undoable: post SEO and post schema, from a snapshot of the post. Not undoable: term SEO, and every redirect create, update or delete, including a delete that only trashes.
  • Schema abilities need the rich-snippet module. edit-post-schema replaces the post's own schema with one primary entry of the chosen type; off returns it to the post-type default.
  • Site-wide settings are not writable as abilities; changing one is an execute-php merge into the shared option, never a blind overwrite.
  • Trashed redirects stay restorable in Rank Math's own screen for 30 days before Rank Math purges them; GoBuildWP's log cannot bring them back.

Other plugins

Rank Math next to other SEO tools

  • Rank Math should not run alongside another SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or AIOSEO. When more than one is active, the bulk SEO abilities need a provider named.
  • GoBuildWP's automatic slug-change redirects use the first available store; the Redirection plugin wins if installed, otherwise Rank Math's table. redirects-status reports which is in use and whether Rank Math also watches slug changes itself.

Post-type robots, status codes and category descriptions

Tracing a noindex back to Rank Math's Titles and Meta defaults

When a post is missing from search and its own robots read default, the cause is usually one level up. rank-math-get-settings with scope titles returns, for every post type and taxonomy, the title and description templates and the effective robots a post inherits, plus a custom_robots flag: false means the type follows the site-wide default, true means the type has its own override. A product type with custom_robots true and noindex is the answer to a lot of puzzled search console reports.

Reading that is safe on any profile. Changing it is not an ability: the reference describes an execute-php merge into the shared rank-math-options- option, and execute-php is a critical ability that runs only on Developer Full Access, with confirm. For most owners the right move is to read the value through the agent and change it in Rank Math's Titles and Meta screen. Templates come back with Rank Math's variables, such as %title%, %sep% and %sitename%, intact; ask the agent to leave them in place when it edits a single post's title.

301, 302, 307, 410 or 451 for a Rank Math redirect

rank-math-create-redirect accepts five codes and nothing else. Use 301 when a page has moved for good, 302 or 307 when the move is temporary and the old URL will come back, 410 when content is gone with no replacement, and 451 when it was removed for legal reasons. The last two take no target: Rank Math answers the request with the status itself, which is often the honest response to a 404 Monitor entry for a product you no longer sell.

A useful habit with the 404 log is to read the user agent and referrer columns before redirecting anything. A high-hit URL requested only by a scanner is not worth a redirect, while one with a real referring page points at a broken link that is better fixed at its source with the content abilities.

A category-by-category Rank Math term SEO review

Category and tag pages are often left with no description at all. rank-math-get-term-seo reads a term's focus keywords, title, description, canonical, robots and social fields, and rank-math-edit-term-seo merges only the fields sent. Because term SEO is not restorable from the ledger, ask the agent to list the current values for each term in its reply before writing, so the old wording is on record. On Read Only it can still produce the full review.

  • "Read only: list every product category with an empty Rank Math description."
  • "For each tag in that list, propose a title and description under 155 characters and wait for my approval."
  • "Mark the 404 for /old-catalogue.pdf as 410 Gone instead of redirecting it."

Questions

Rank Math questions

Why did a Rank Math redirect not work after it was created?

Usually Rank Math's setup wizard was never finished or skipped, so the redirections module is not running. GoBuildWP refuses to create a redirect in that state and says how to fix it.

Can the agent read the Rank Math SEO score?

With GoBuildWP Pro, yes: its rank-math-get-post-seo returns the computed score when include_score is set. It is Rank Math's own calculation and read-only. Free's copy of that ability returns the title, description and robots only.

Which Rank Math schema types can the agent set?

Article, BlogPosting, NewsArticle, Product, Course, Event, Recipe, Book, JobPosting, Service, SoftwareApplication, VideoObject, Person and Restaurant. Rank Math fills the remaining properties from its template.

Are Rank Math match types such as regex supported?

Yes. A redirect can take several source patterns, each with its own comparison, matching the exact, contains, starts with, ends with and regex choices in Rank Math's editor.

Rank Math documents AI-assistant setup through MCP. Compare the live operation schemas, credential scope and metadata ownership with the GoBuildWP integration before selecting a workflow. Rank Math MCP setup guide

Where these facts come from

GoBuildWP behaviour is taken from the plugin source and the ability reference; third-party details from the vendor documentation below, checked by the GoBuildWP team.

Rank Math is a separate product; no partnership or endorsement is implied.

Try it on Rank Math in Read Only first

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