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Yoast SEO Abilities

This documentation explains what the Abilities API is and how Yoast SEO integrates with it.

What is the Abilities API?​

Abilities API is a standardized way for plugins to expose what they can do, introduced in WordPress 6.9. It allows plugins to do so by providing:

  • A registry where plugins declare their capabilities/features/functionalities (also known as abilities) with structured input and output schemas.
  • A central REST discovery endpoint (/wp-json/wp-abilities/v1/abilities) where any client/plugin can list everything that's available.
  • A standardized execution endpoint (/run) to invoke any registered ability.
  • Permission checks for every ability, so access control is consistent.

Once an ability is registered, it is discoverable and executable from PHP, JavaScript, and the REST API. That way, AI agents (and other third-party systems) can use that ability for their purposes.

Yoast SEO Abilities​

Yoast SEO currently registers five abilities across two pages:

Analysis scores — three read-only abilities that return the SEO, readability, and inclusive language analysis scores for the most recently modified posts. Documented on the Analysis scores page.

  • yoast-seo/get-seo-scores
  • yoast-seo/get-readability-scores
  • yoast-seo/get-inclusive-language-scores

Post SEO data — two abilities for reading and updating the full SEO metadata of a post identified by ID, permalink, or title keywords. Documented on the Post SEO data page.

  • yoast-seo/get-post-seo-data
  • yoast-seo/update-post-seo-data

All five abilities can be discovered at /wp-json/wp-abilities/v1/abilities?category=yoast-seo along with their most relevant information.

Use cases for the Yoast SEO Abilities​

AI agents​

Assuming that an AI agent is connected to a WordPress-enabled MCP site (details on how one can do that, in this helpful tutorial from the WP Core team) with Yoast SEO active, it can then discover the above abilities and answer questions or perform tasks like:

  • "Take a look at the latest posts of my website and give me a report of the analysis of their SEO scores. Do you see a clear pattern in the subjects of the best performing ones?"
  • "Do you see the readability of my recent content going upwards or downwards?"
  • "I want to know if I have content on my site that uses non-inclusive language. If there's indeed not inclusive language in my content, do you see a correlation between the subjects covered?"
  • "Show me the current SEO title and meta description for my post about hiking boots."
  • "Update the focus keyphrase for the post at https://example.com/hiking-boots/ to 'waterproof hiking boots'."

That way, Yoast SEO exposes both the results of its analyses and the ability to read and update SEO metadata to authenticated AI agents, enabling users to navigate through useful SEO data of their website and perform SEO-related actions accordingly.

Third-party code​

For plugins interested in building features on top of Yoast SEO Analyses, a more traditional way to consume the Yoast SEO Abilities would be to use the new WP REST API endpoints. This allows information about a website's recent posts to be reliably retrieved in a structured way.

Prerequisites​

  • WordPress 6.9 or higher.
  • Indexables should be enabled and fully built.