WordPress SEO plugins compared

It depends on your priorities. On the 78 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 since Visibility 2.0. 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, and the Abilities API for AI agents is planned rather than shipped.

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. On top of that it carries the signals with actual evidence behind them, content freshness, verifiable author expertise and Q&A structure as FAQPage. llms.txt is also free in 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.

Not yet, and the row in the table says ✗ for that reason. Yoast, Rank Math and SureRank register abilities today; Visibility doesn't, because doing it would force its minimum WordPress version up to 6.9 and leave about a quarter of all WordPress sites without updates. The reading side for agents is already there through llms.txt, the Markdown endpoints and the ReadAction pointers in Site Identity. The writing side ships when that version gap closes.

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.