AI SEO for WordPress: Plugins vs a Done-for-You Service

The short answer

The main AI SEO plugins for WordPress are Yoast SEO (Premium adds AI that writes titles and meta descriptions, suggests keyphrase fixes and summarizes posts), Rank Math with its paid Content AI add-on (40+ AI writing tools and a blog post wizard), All in One SEO (an AI content generator, one-click "Optimize with AI" and AI answer checks) and Jetpack AI (a general writing assistant). They make each step faster for the person doing the work. None of them decides what to write, writes it from your real catalog, links it into your sales pages and publishes it on a schedule while you do something else. For that, a done-for-you service like RunOctopus publishes straight to your WordPress site with no plugin to run.

So the honest question is not "which AI plugin is best." It is "do I want a better tool for doing SEO myself, or do I want it done?" This guide answers both, with every price checked on the vendor's own site.

The AI SEO plugins for WordPress, side by side

Checked on each vendor's own site on October 20, 2026. Prices exclude tax. Rank Math showed us euro prices, and you may see your local currency.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is the best-known SEO plugin on WordPress, with more than 10 million active installs listed on WordPress.org. The free plugin handles the basics: titles and descriptions you set by hand, sitemaps, basic schema and an llms.txt file for AI crawlers (our llms.txt explainer covers what that file does and does not do).

The AI lives in Yoast SEO Premium, $118.80 a year for one site. AI Generate writes five title and meta description options at once, by page or in bulk, and you approve each before it saves. AI Optimize suggests where to place your keyphrase, which you apply or dismiss. AI Summarize writes a short summary block for a post. Premium also outputs more schema types.

Yoast SEO AI+ is the bigger bundle, $29.90 a month billed yearly. It includes Premium plus Yoast's WooCommerce, Local, News and Video add-ons, and AI Brand Insights, which checks how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini once a week. If you run WooCommerce, our Yoast for WooCommerce guide goes deeper.

Best for: site owners who write their own posts and want help with the fiddly parts, titles, descriptions and on-page checks, inside a plugin they probably already have.

Rank Math and Content AI

Rank Math is the other giant. The free plugin covers the SEO basics, and PRO starts at €7.99 a month billed yearly. Its AI is a separate subscription called Content AI, from €5.99 a month billed yearly on Starter up to €16.99 on Expert, and new PRO, Business and Agency members get a 15-day trial.

Content AI goes further toward writing than Yoast does. It has more than 40 AI tools, from outlines and intros to a long-form Blog Post Wizard, plus bulk AI titles and descriptions, image alt text, a "Fix SEO Tests with AI" button and RankBot, a chat assistant. Usage is capped by plan each month, for example 15 long-form articles on Starter and 60 on Creator, and unused usage does not roll over.

Best for: hands-on bloggers and small teams who want an AI writer and an SEO checker in one dashboard, and who will edit what it drafts.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO bundles AI credits into every paid plan, from 10,000 on Basic ($49.50 the first year for one site) to 200,000 on Elite ($299.50 for 100 sites). Renewals are at full price, roughly double the first year. Its AI features include an AI Content Generator for metadata, FAQs and key points, an AI Assistant that drafts posts and images from a prompt, and "Optimize with AI," which rewrites a title, description, headline and content in one click. It also generates an llms.txt file.

The AI Suite checks whether your brand appears in AI answers from ChatGPT and Perplexity, with your competitors alongside. One catch to read before buying: the real-time Writing Assistant is powered by SEOBoost and needs a separate paid SEOBoost subscription.

Best for: owners who want AI credits included in one bill and a quick look at whether AI answers mention them.

Jetpack AI

Jetpack AI, from the company behind WordPress.com, is a general writing assistant in the block editor. It generates text, images, tables and lists, suggests titles and summaries and fixes grammar. The free plan includes 20 requests. It is not an SEO plugin in the Yoast sense, so most sites pair it with one of the three above.

Best for: writers who want a helper in the editor, not an SEO system.

If you do it yourself: a short setup that works

If you choose the plugin path, these steps get the most out of whichever plugin you pick.

1. Use one SEO plugin, not two. Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO each write titles, schema and sitemaps. Running two doubles the tags and confuses search engines. Pick one and switch the others off.
2. Turn on llms.txt and check your robots rules. All three main plugins can generate an llms.txt file. More important, make sure no security plugin or setting blocks the AI crawlers you want reading your site.
3. Fill the gaps in bulk first. Yoast Premium and Rank Math's Content AI can draft missing titles and descriptions in bulk. Review them, because a bulk draft is a starting point, then save.
4. Write for the long question, not the short keyword. People ask AI assistants full questions with a place or a need in them. A post that answers "best plumber for a slab leak in Tampa" plainly has a better chance of being named than one more post about "plumbing tips."
5. Link every new post into what you sell. Two or three links from each post to the product, collection or service pages it is really about. No plugin does this well on its own.
6. Add an FAQ with matching schema. Short, direct answers to the questions buyers ask are easy for AI assistants to quote. Our FAQPage schema guide shows how.
7. Publish on a schedule you can keep. One good page a week beats ten in a burst and then silence. Steady publishing is where most do-it-yourself plans stall.
8. Check the result in AI answers, not just Google. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity your buyers' questions every month and note who they name. AIOSEO's AI Suite or Yoast SEO AI+ can automate part of that.

What no plugin does for you

Every plugin above is good at the step in front of it. What they leave to you is the part that decides whether AI answers and Google ever name you:

• Deciding what to write. Which real questions your buyers ask, and which of your products or services is the honest answer to each.
• Writing from what you actually sell. A plugin drafts from your prompt. It does not know your catalog, your service area or what you will and will not do.
• Linking into the pages that sell. A new post that never links to your product, collection or service pages helps less than it should. Our guide to internal linking explains why.
• Publishing on a schedule. The bottleneck on most WordPress sites is not tools. It is time. A plugin waits for you to open the editor.

If you are choosing among the plugins for the basics alone, our roundup of WooCommerce SEO plugins compares them on everything beyond AI.

Two ways to do AI SEO on WordPress

The two paths are not rivals on your server. If RunOctopus publishes your pages, Yoast or Rank Math keep handling sitemaps, schema and the settings you already rely on. What changes is who does the writing, linking and publishing.

On the done-for-you path, Ollie, our AI, and our team research what your buyers ask in Google and in AI assistants, write the pages from your real products and services, link them into the pages that sell, and publish them straight to your WordPress site. It publishes on its own: you do not approve each page first, though you can read anything that went live and ask for changes. The same service works on Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix. If you want to compare services, our guide to AI SEO services lists what a good one should deliver.

Who should use which

• You write your own posts and want help with titles and checks: Yoast SEO Premium.
• You want an AI writer inside WordPress and will edit every draft: Rank Math with Content AI.
• You want AI credits and an AI-answer check in one plugin bill: AIOSEO, keeping the SEOBoost add-on in mind.
• You only want a writing helper in the editor: Jetpack AI next to your SEO plugin.
• You want to be found and named in AI answers but have no time to write, link and publish: a done-for-you service. Start with a free AI visibility check to see where you stand.

Our verdict

For do-it-yourself AI SEO on WordPress, all four plugins are worth having, and Yoast or Rank Math belongs on almost every site. If you write your own content, pick the plugin whose AI matches how you work and you will be well served.