AI tool updates and yearly code cleanup

This release is for developers and anyone who builds on Yoast SEO. It brings two changes: you can now use your AI tool to update titles, meta descriptions, and social previews with Yoast SEO Abilities. In addition, we’ve done our yearly cleanup of deprecated code. If you maintain a theme or plugin that hooks into Yoast SEO, read the cleanup section before you update.

Since April, Yoast SEO Abilities have let you use your AI tool to check your SEO, readability, and inclusive language scores. In September, you could also read a post’s SEO data and correct its technical settings without opening wp-admin. Now you can update the titles and descriptions people see in search results and social feeds too.

The yoast-seo/update-post-seo-data ability now supports six more fields:

• SEO title
• Meta description
• Open Graph title and description (what platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn show when someone shares your post)
• X title and description

For example, say you’ve renamed a product, and its title and social previews still show the old name. You can use your AI tool to read the post’s SEO data, review what’s out of date, and update it in the same conversation.

Everything else works as before. Your focus keyphrase stays read-only, so you always set it yourself. In addition, access still follows native WordPress capability checks.

Already using Abilities? The new fields are ready once you update. New to it? The developer documentation covers how to connect your LLM and the WordPress MCP Adapter, plus the full ability list and schemas.

Yearly cleanup of deprecated code

We’ve removed code we deprecated in Yoast SEO 26.1 or earlier. If your site, theme, or plugin still uses any of it, you’ll have been seeing deprecation notices for at least a year. As a result, most sites won’t notice a thing. However, these changes are the most likely to affect you:

• We’ve removed the WPSEO_Frontend class, which we deprecated in Yoast SEO 14.0 (April 2020).
• We’ve removed the wpseo_opengraph and wpseo_twitter actions. Use wpseo_frontend_presenters instead. You’ll still get a warning if your code hooks into them.
• The wpseo_robots_array filter must now return an array. Returning anything else causes a fatal error.
• We’ve deprecated the $where and $format arguments of WPSEO_Database_Proxy::upsert(). That means we’ll remove them in next year’s cleanup.

You can find the full list of removals here.

Beth Parker

Beth is Product Marketing Manager at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.

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