WordPress SEO plugins compared

It depends on your priorities. On the 81 rows of this table Visibility has the most free features, and among the plugins that also sell a paid tier, Rank Math leads. If you want a big all-in-one suite with keyword analysis and content scoring, Yoast and All in One SEO have it. And if you want the SEO, AEO and GEO essentials for free, lightweight and on the WordPress core, Visibility is the only one with nothing behind a paywall, no database tables and no data sent to third parties.

Rank Math is the most complete free alternative among the freemium suites, and Visibility matches or beats it on everything except keyword analysis, rich schema types and the 404 monitor, while adding llms.txt, Markdown endpoints and WooCommerce URLs that Rank Math doesn't have. Slim SEO and The SEO Framework are very light too, with a much smaller feature set.

Not anymore. It builds the same three product URL structures, removes the /product-tag/ base and adds the automatic 301 redirects, which are the two things Premmerce keeps for its premium licence, and it also drops the bases Premmerce doesn't cover: blog categories, post tags, brands and product attributes. Its settings import in one click from the Tools tab. What Premmerce still has and Visibility doesn't is the SKU-based product slug and the .html suffix. See the side-by-side table.

Keyword analysis, readability scoring and traffic lights, on purpose, because that is where most of the weight of the big suites comes from. Also rich schema types that need data your content doesn't provide (Recipe, Event, Product), a visual schema builder, news and video sitemaps, a 404 monitor with logging, AI content generation and a Search Console dashboard. WooCommerce Product schema is deliberately left to WooCommerce, which already emits it.

Yes. There's no Pro version, no features behind a paywall, no upsell banners and no data collection. The whole plugin is free and stays free.

For most sites, yes: it covers titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, Open Graph, schema, robots, redirect management and sitemap control. It leaves out keyword analysis and content scoring on purpose, so if you rely on those, keep your suite. And don't run two SEO plugins at once, they clash in the head and hurt your SEO.

Measured on the same install, The SEO Framework and Visibility add the least memory to a page a visitor loads, 0.13 MB and 0.29 MB on top of the same site with no SEO plugin at all, and Visibility reads the least PHP per request, 245 KB against the 2.5 MB of AIOSEO and the 3.1 MB of Yoast. In the block editor both stay under half a megabyte, where Rank Math adds 7.2 MB and AIOSEO 5.2 MB. Visibility is also the only one of the eight that creates no database table, no cron event and makes no external calls. Every figure, the method and the raw data are in the measured section.

On a single post, over the same install with no SEO plugin: The SEO Framework adds 0.13 MB, Visibility 0.29 MB, SureRank 0.31 MB, Slim SEO 0.38 MB, SEOPress 0.40 MB, Yoast 0.85 MB, AIOSEO 2.02 MB and Rank Math 3.85 MB. Queries move in a different order, with SEOPress adding one and AIOSEO thirty-two, and two of them, Visibility and The SEO Framework, end up below the no-plugin baseline. The block editor is where the gap opens: under 0.5 MB for the lightest, 5.2 MB for AIOSEO and 7.2 MB for Rank Math, which also ships 1.8 MB of CSS and JavaScript into that screen against 68 KB. The measured section has the tables, the method and the instrument that took the readings.

What AI assistants read is clean metadata and schema, and Visibility is built for SEO, AEO and GEO at once: llms.txt, llms-full.txt, Markdown endpoints, AI crawler control and Site Identity JSON-LD, all native in the Discover tab, plus abilities on the WordPress Abilities API that let an AI agent edit the SEO of your entries and terms. On top of that it covers three signals worth getting right, content freshness, author expertise you can verify and Q&A structure as FAQPage, without promising a citation for any of them. llms.txt is also free in Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress; the llms-full.txt and the Markdown endpoint on top are only here. For AI crawler analytics and visibility scoring, VigIA extends Visibility on the crawler side.

Yes, on WordPress 6.9 or later. Visibility registers six abilities that read and edit the SEO of an entry or a term, list the entries with no Meta description or Meta title and read the SEO status of the site, and each one asks for the permission the editor asks for. Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, SureRank and Slim SEO register abilities too, so seven of the eight plugins in the table have them (SEOPress and SureRank ship theirs switched off), and The SEO Framework is the one without. Visibility didn't raise its minimum WordPress version for this: on an older WordPress the abilities are just not registered.

Only the ones that are truly essential for SEO, and always leaning on native WordPress features. The idea is to stay lean: no bloat, nothing that slows down or overloads your site. If something doesn't help most sites or the core can handle it, it's left out on purpose.