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Yoast SEO MCP: post meta, the taxonomy option and Premium redirects

With the Yoast SEO MCP integration, an AI client reads and edits the fields Yoast shows in its sidebar (focus keyphrase, SEO title, meta description, robots, social previews, schema types) for posts and for categories and tags. Both kinds of edit can be rolled back. GoBuildWP Free covers a post's SEO title, meta description and robots, with Yoast's 0/2/1 index codes mapped for you; keyphrase, social, schema, term and redirect work is Pro. Premium sites also get redirects, written through Yoast's redirect manager so the redirect files it exports stay in step; those writes cannot be undone.

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Rewrite the SEO title and meta description for our Pricing page around the keyphrase 'website maintenance plans', and mark it as cornerstone content.

  1. wppilot/yoast-check-setupRead

    Confirms Yoast is active, free or Premium, and that pages are a manageable post type. This task needs GoBuildWP Pro, since Free's Yoast edit takes no keyphrase or cornerstone flag.

  2. wppilot/yoast-get-post-seoRead

    Returns the current keyphrase, title and description and, with include_scores, Yoast's SEO and readability scores for reference.

  3. wppilot/yoast-edit-post-seoWrite

    Sends focus_keyphrase, seo_title, meta_description and cornerstone true; robots and Open Graph stay as they were.

  4. wppilot/yoast-get-post-seoRead

    Reads the stored values back, with Yoast variables such as %%sitename%% kept unexpanded.

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 8
Abilities
10
Requires
WordPress 6.9+, PHP 8.0+, Yoast SEO 21.0+

Worked example

Rewrite a key landing page's snippet

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

The Pricing page carries the new snippet and cornerstone flag, recorded so rollback-change can restore the earlier values. Scores are Yoast's own calculation: read, never written.

Inspect the actual rendered head after saving metadata. Stored values, emitted tags and a search engine’s chosen snippet are separate. For supported recovery, restore the retained before-image, rebuild Yoast indexables where required and inspect the head again.

  1. yoast-check-setup

    Confirms Yoast is active, free or Premium, and that pages are a manageable post type. This task needs GoBuildWP Pro, since Free's Yoast edit takes no keyphrase or cornerstone flag.

  2. yoast-get-post-seo

    Returns the current keyphrase, title and description and, with include_scores, Yoast's SEO and readability scores for reference.

  3. yoast-edit-post-seo

    Sends focus_keyphrase, seo_title, meta_description and cornerstone true; robots and Open Graph stay as they were.

  4. yoast-get-post-seo

    Reads the stored values back, with Yoast variables such as %%sitename%% kept unexpanded.

Data model

Three places Yoast keeps SEO data

Per-post values are _yoast_wpseo_ post meta. Yoast stores noindex as a code, 0 for default, 2 for index and 1 for noindex, and writing a value equal to the default deletes the row, so a read shows the default rather than a missing field. The abilities translate those codes for you.

Term SEO is not term meta. It lives in one shared option, wpseo_taxonomy_meta, and a term edit reads the term's full set and writes it back so fields you did not send are not reset. Site settings sit in the wpseo, wpseo_titles and wpseo_social groups and change only through WPSEO_Options::set via execute-php.

What Yoast prints comes from its indexables table, which it fills and updates as content changes. A rollback restores the post meta; if the old title still shows, saving the post again makes Yoast rebuild that indexable. Premium redirects are held in an option and exported to plain, regex and server redirect files.

Abilities

Yoast SEO abilities by effect

Inspect5

Create and change4

Destructive1

Reference: /docs/reference/yoast

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.

Yoast SEO's own AI tools

The abilities Yoast registers itself

Yoast SEO registers its own abilities in the WordPress Abilities API under the yoast-seo category, so a client connected through the MCP Adapter can discover them. Three are reports: yoast-seo/get-seo-scores, yoast-seo/get-readability-scores and yoast-seo/get-inclusive-language-scores return a na, bad, ok or good rating for the most recently modified posts, ten unless you ask for more. The other pair, yoast-seo/get-post-seo-data and yoast-seo/update-post-seo-data, read and change one post, and both check the wpseo_edit_advanced_metadata capability as well as the user's right to edit that post.

Yoast's current updater accepts SEO title and meta description, canonical, cornerstone, robots, Open Graph and X text, and page and article schema types. Focus keyphrase is readable but is absent from its documented writable fields; term SEO and Premium redirects are outside that post endpoint. Inspect the abilities on the installed Yoast version before comparing coverage.

GoBuildWP combines Yoast work with the site's other plugin modules under its own safety profile and ledger. Free handles one post's title, description and robots; Pro adds keyphrase and social fields, term SEO and supported Premium redirects. Post and term edits have ledger recovery, while redirect writes are irreversible. Yoast's own analysis remains the score source, and neither connection guarantees search-engine indexing.

Other plugins

Yoast beside other redirect and SEO tools

  • Without Premium, GoBuildWP's automatic slug-change redirects use Redirection or Rank Math if installed, otherwise WordPress's old-slug fallback, which misses pages and parent changes; redirects-status says which applies.
  • The plugin-neutral bulk SEO abilities write through Yoast's own per-post helpers, so a call across many posts follows the same storage rules and leaves a ledger row per post.

Limits

Yoast limits

  • Redirect abilities require Yoast SEO Premium and are irreversible: restoring the option alone would leave Yoast's exported redirect file out of step.
  • Never write the wpseo-premium-redirects-base option directly; a redirect written that way is stored but never fires.
  • Terms carry only the index toggle, with no nofollow, advanced robots or schema at term level.
  • Settings are read-only as abilities, and the separator comes back as a code such as sc-dash. Needs Yoast SEO 21.0 or later.

Thin tag archives, breadcrumb titles and Premium redirect formats

Cleaning up thin tag archives with the Yoast SEO MCP term abilities

Sites that tag freely end up with hundreds of tag archives holding one or two posts each. With GoBuildWP Pro, yoast-get-term-seo and yoast-edit-term-seo read and change a term's Yoast fields, and the index toggle is the one that matters here: noindex on a thin tag keeps the archive working for visitors while asking search engines to leave it out. The agent can list tags with their post counts through the core term abilities and propose which to noindex, and you decide tag by tag before it applies the toggle. A low post count is only a starting point: a small tag can still be the best page for a real search, so look at what each archive offers and whether people arrive on it before excluding it.

Because Yoast keeps all term SEO in one shared option, the edit reads the term's full set and writes it back with only your change, so a tag's title or description is not reset along the way. The same edit can set breadcrumb_title, the shorter label Yoast's breadcrumbs show for a category whose real name is long. Terms carry no nofollow or advanced robots, so a request for those on a category is refused rather than half-applied.

Per-post advanced robots: noimageindex, noarchive and nosnippet

Beyond index and follow, yoast-edit-post-seo in GoBuildWP Pro sets three advanced directives on a single post: noimageindex asks search engines not to index the images on that page, noarchive asks them not to offer a cached copy, and nosnippet asks them not to show a text snippet in results. They suit narrow cases, such as a page whose images are licensed for the site only, and are easy to overuse. Ask the agent to report which posts already carry them before adding more; whether a search engine honours a directive is its decision, and the rendered head is the only thing the agent can confirm.

Plain or regex: choosing a Yoast Premium redirect format

yoast-create-redirect takes a format, plain by default or regex, and a type of 301, 302, 307, 410 or 451. Plain matches one path exactly and is right for almost every moved page. Regex suits a whole retired section, such as everything under an old /shop/category/ prefix, but a loose pattern can catch URLs nobody meant to move. Ask for regex redirects to be tested against a list of real URLs from the site before they are created, and use yoast-list-redirects with the format filter to review the regex rules on their own, since they are the ones most likely to surprise you later. Redirect writes need both Yoast SEO Premium and GoBuildWP Pro; see Free vs Pro for the split.

  • "Read only: which tags have fewer than three posts, and are any of them already noindexed in Yoast?"
  • "Set the breadcrumb title for the 'Commercial and Residential Landscaping Services' category to 'Landscaping'."
  • "Draft a regex redirect from the old /shop/category/ URLs to /products/, and show me five real URLs it would match before creating it."

Questions

Yoast SEO questions

Does Yoast's index default mean my page is indexed?

Not necessarily. It means follow the post type's setting, so if that type is noindexed, so is the page. Setting index explicitly overrides that post-type noindex for this one page, so Yoast stops printing noindex for it. That only removes a restriction: the page becomes eligible, and search engines still decide whether to crawl and index it.

Why does a rolled-back Yoast title still show?

Yoast renders from its indexables table. Saving the post again rebuilds the indexable from the restored meta.

Can the agent edit Yoast redirects on the free plugin?

No. Redirects need Yoast SEO Premium and GoBuildWP Pro, and yoast-check-setup reports whether they are available. Yoast's free plugin with GoBuildWP Free still gets per-post titles, descriptions and robots.

Where is Yoast's brand identity stored?

Company or person details live in the wpseo_titles group, not the social group, a common place to look in the wrong option.

Yoast documents separate abilities to read and update a post's SEO metadata, including its custom SEO title and meta description. The update changes supplied fields only; an empty value can clear a field. Advanced-metadata capability and access to edit the target post are required. Analysis scores are a separate read surface. GoBuildWP's own reference defines its supported operations; neither interface promises a ranking gain. Official documentation checked 13 October 2026; installed-version behavior was not tested here. Yoast post SEO data abilities

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.

Yoast SEO is a separate product; no partnership or endorsement is implied.

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