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Best WordPress SEO plugins and tools compared, and what each free version does

This is the shopping question rather than the how to: which plugin to install, what its free version covers, and the three tools outside WordPress you need anyway. One plugin only, whichever you choose.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

Two WordPress questions get asked with the same words. One is how to do SEO on WordPress, which is mostly about controlling what the platform generates on its own and is answered separately. The other is which tools to install, which is this page. The short answer is one plugin plus three things that are not plugins, and the plugin choice matters less than people argue about.

The criterion: what does the free version do, and what specifically is behind the paid line? Both vendors publish it, so this is checkable rather than a matter of taste.

The plugin decision, on published free and paid scope

PluginFree version coversWhat the paid line adds, as published
Yoast SEOTitles, descriptions, canonical control, index directives, XML sitemaps, readability and a single focus keyphraseYoast's own product page, read 21 October 2026, publishes Premium at $118.80 a year excluding VAT, adding a redirect manager with bulk CSV handling, checking a post against up to five keyphrases, internal linking suggestions and its own AI drafting features. It also sells a separate Shopify product and a Google Docs add on.
Rank MathTitles, descriptions, schema types, sitemaps, index control and multiple keyword optimisationIts pricing page, read 21 October 2026, publishes Pro tiers adding rank tracking with twelve months of position history, a schema generator with templates, an automatic broken link checker, AI Link Genius for internal link building and automated keyword linking, with an agency tier supporting 500 client websites and 50,000 tracked keywords, plus a 15 day trial of its AI plan.

Install one. Two SEO plugins produce conflicting canonical tags and duplicate markup, and that is a real problem rather than a tidiness preference. If you switch, use the importer and then crawl the site to check what actually changed in the HTML.

The three tools you need that are not plugins

Search Console, because no plugin can tell you what Google recorded about your site. A crawler, because a plugin reports per post and a crawl reports the whole index including the archives WordPress generated without asking: Screaming Frog publishes a free limit of 500 URLs, read 21 October 2026, which covers most WordPress sites once you count tag and category pages. And PageSpeed Insights on your templates rather than your homepage, because theme and plugin weight is the usual WordPress speed problem and no SEO plugin fixes it.

The plugin feature worth the paid line, and the one that is not

The redirect manager is worth it if you move or delete pages often, because WordPress leaves a URL behind every time and a manual redirect list stops being maintained. Internal linking suggestions are worth it on a site with a real archive, because new posts arrive with nothing durable pointing at them. We measure that on ourselves and publish the figure below.

What is usually not worth the paid line is a readability or keyword density score. It is a number the plugin invented, no search engine publishes a target for it, and chasing it has produced a great deal of stiff writing.

One plugin development worth knowing about

Rank Math now publishes AI visibility tracking as part of its product, and Yoast publishes AI drafting features. The SEO plugin market is adding the measurement of assistant answers in the same move the big suites made: Semrush sells AI visibility inside its SEO tiers, read 21 October 2026, and Moz publishes AI Explorer for what AI agents say about a brand. If you already pay one of them, their module is the cheaper route for you and you should take it.

The one check none of these tools runs, and who sells it

Every tool on this page measures a search engine. None of them measures the other place your buyer now asks, which is an assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews compose an answer for each asker, naming some businesses and not others, and there is no index a crawler can read to find out whose name came up. Inside WordPress the practical consequence is that your best page can be the one an assistant quotes while your analytics records no visit at all.

AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else. We are not an SEO tool and we are not in the ranking above, because a buyer who came here for a crawler or a keyword index should buy one of the tools named above instead. What we do is ask your buyer question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named. Our own figures, from the rendered text of our llms.txt read on 21 October 2026: one credit is one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost one credit and a Claude check costs three because Claude costs more to run. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and that same file says SEO Start watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand harvest rather than an engine watch. The first tier that watches the five engines is Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. A managed option is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month at a three month minimum, so we are not going to convert it for you.

Where the tools on this page beat us, plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read on 21 October 2026, tracks prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. AI Mode and Copilot are two surfaces we do not read at all, and its page publishes an overage price of $0.020 per check and the cost of a Claude update at 8 checks, which is a level of unit disclosure worth holding every vendor to, us included. Semrush, whose SEO and AI search pricing page we read the same day, sells AI visibility inside the suite you may already be paying for, with 50 prompts tracked daily and 300 AI visibility reports a day on its Starter tier. Moz now publishes AI Explorer, described on moz.com as showing what the top AI agents say about your brand. If you already pay one of those three, their module is the cheaper route and you should take it. We are the single purpose option for somebody who does not want a suite.

Installing fewer things

No competitor price table is reproduced on this page. What is quoted instead is the published limit that sets a tier, because a limit is the vendor's own statement of what you get and it does not move with the country you are reading from. That matters more than it sounds: on 21 October 2026 a fetch of one vendor's US pricing page from this machine returned Indian rupee prices, because the request left from an Indian address. A 200 response can still be the wrong page.

The highest return WordPress SEO work on most sites is removing plugins, deciding which generated archives belong in the index, and giving the templates a real title pattern. None of that is a purchase and all of it survives a plugin change.

On the on page checks a plugin reports and the order worth reading them in, which is where most plugin output is misread: on page SEO checker tools compared, and the order to read their findings in. On 21 October 2026 we read every link we could see on this site, 2,169 page bodies in all, against 2,082 live pages, and 935 of them, 44.9 percent, had no inbound link from any of those bodies. That figure is an upper bound rather than a count. No other page on this site links to the one above.

Questions about WordPress SEO tools

Which is better, Yoast or Rank Math?

Both cover the core job. Compare the published free scope against what you need and pick one. The decision that matters more is running only one.

Do I need a paid SEO plugin?

Only if you need the redirect manager or internal linking at scale. The free versions of both cover titles, descriptions, sitemaps and index control.

Can a plugin replace Search Console?

No. A plugin reports your settings. Search Console reports what Google did, which no plugin can see.

Do SEO plugins slow WordPress down?

Less than most themes and page builders do. Measure the template with field data before blaming the plugin.

Should I switch plugins?

Only for a feature you will use. Use the importer, then crawl the site and compare the HTML, because the risk in a switch is silent tag changes.

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