Yoast and Rank Math
What each needs, and why only the active plugin's fields are written.
Pressbotics can set the SEO title, meta description and focus keyword on a post — but only when the site is actually capable of accepting them. Two things must be true, and both halves matter.
The two halves
- The free Pressbotics companion plugin, installed and active. It is what opens the SEO fields to the REST API at all.
- Yoast SEO, installed and active — verified end to end on a live site. Rank Math is supported in the same way but has not been tested, so treat it as supported rather than proven.
Neither half works alone. WordPress core does not expose SEO plugin fields over REST, and neither Yoast nor Rank Math opens them by default — so without the companion plugin no REST client can write them. And with the companion plugin but no SEO plugin, there is no field to write into.
Only the active plugin's keys are written
Yoast and Rank Math store their meta under different keys. Pressbotics detects which one is active and writes that one. It does not write both, and it does not migrate values between them. If you run both plugins at once, resolve that in WordPress first — the site itself will not behave predictably either.
Any other SEO plugin returns "unsupported". Rather than write a key that might be wrong, Pressbotics declines and tells you.
The contract you get back
| seo_status | Meaning | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| none | No SEO fields were requested on the call. | Nothing to write. |
| unsupported | SEO fields were requested but the site cannot write them. | seo_error names the missing piece: the Pressbotics companion plugin, or a supported SEO plugin. |
| ok | The site is capable and the SEO meta was actually written. | Requires the companion plugin AND an SEO plugin. Yoast is verified end to end on a live site; Rank Math is supported but has not been tested. Only the active plugin's meta keys are written. |
"unsupported" never means the post failed. The post publishes; the SEO fields simply were not writable, and seo_error names the missing half.
Checking a site
Ask your agent to call site_health, or use Refresh site info on the site in the dashboard. Both re-probe the site and update the detected plugin version and SEO capability. Detection is read from the last successful probe, so if you installed a plugin after connecting, the stored value is stale until you re-probe.
What can go wrong
- The plugin is installed but not activated. Detection reads active plugins only.
- seo_title longer than 70 characters or meta_description longer than 200 — those are the accepted limits.
- You expected the excerpt to become the meta description. It does not. They are different fields with different jobs.