Description
Aetos SEO is an audit plugin, not another meta-writer. It runs alongside
your existing SEO plugin (Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO, SEOPress, or any other)
and tells you what is actually broken, missing, or risky across technical SEO
and AI-readiness, then shows you a prioritized list of what to fix first.
Think of it as a second opinion that does not touch your meta titles, your
schema output, or your sitemap. It only reads, diagnoses, and reports.
Why a separate audit plugin?
Every SEO plugin tells you it is doing a great job. None of them tell you
when something is wrong outside of their own scope: a noindex left from
staging, a canonical pointing at the wrong domain, a schema that is valid
but does not list the right entity, an <h1> that does not match the
title, a robots.txt that blocks an AI crawler you actually want to be in,
or a sitemap that omits half your category pages.
Aetos SEO does that read across the whole rendered page, then ranks the
findings by severity so you can fix the highest-impact issues first.
What the free edition checks
- Technical SEO – indexability, canonicals, robots directives, sitemap
presence and freshness, redirects, broken links, HTTP error pages. - Crawl coverage – what search engines and AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot,
Claude-Web, Google-Extended, etc.) can actually reach on your site. - On-page – titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, duplicate
patterns, language anddircorrectness for Arabic / RTL sites. - Mobile usability – viewport, readability heuristics, tap target sanity.
- Media – missing alt text, oversized images, lazy-loading hints.
- Structured data – is valid JSON-LD present for Organization, Article,
Breadcrumb? Are required fields filled? - AI-readiness (AEO / GEO) – is your content readable by AI answer engines?
Checks AI-crawler access in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot,
Google-Extended and more), llms.txt presence, JSON-LD entity coverage
(Organization, sameAs, author / E-E-A-T, publisher), FAQ / HowTo schema,
H2 / H3 passage structure for answer extraction, and Open Graph completeness. - Performance basics – asset counts, cache headers, heavy CSS / JS.
- Analytics stack – auto-detects GA4, Google Tag Manager, Microsoft
Clarity, and Meta Pixel. - Security basics – HTTPS, mixed content, exposed admin endpoints
(informational).
What you actually see
Every finding includes: a plain-language title, a severity badge (High /
Medium / Low / Info), the pages where it was detected, an “Open” / “Fixed”
status, guidance on how to verify the fix, and a “why this matters”
explanation. Results are shown directly in the Findings screen.
Bilingual interface (Arabic and English)
The plugin auto-detects RTL sites and switches the admin interface to
Arabic. Finding titles, severity levels, and “why this matters” copy are
all translated.
How it differs from Pro
Pro is sold separately at aetosseo.com and is
uploaded to your site by you, like a separate premium add-on. The
WordPress.org edition is a complete local audit tool: it shows every finding it
computes in full, and you set the scan depth yourself in Settings (the default
is 50 pages, or set 0 to analyze every page on your site).
The WordPress.org edition diagnoses your technical SEO and AI-readiness.
Pro is for acting on what it finds and going deeper: advanced
answer-engine modules, industry modules, deeper content analysis, internal
page-opportunity prioritization, AI handoff reports with copy-paste prompts
for any AI assistant, and agency-style HTML / PDF / CSV reports. Pro audits
from inside WordPress too, and it does not connect your site to any external
SEO, analytics, or AI service.
External services
The free edition does not automatically contact any third-party
service. Updates ship through WordPress.org like any other free plugin
(handled by WordPress core, not by this plugin).
During an audit, the plugin performs HTTP requests against your own
WordPress site to inspect your public pages, robots.txt, sitemaps, and
internal links. These are same-site requests; no page content leaves your
server. To run audits in the background it may also trigger WordPress cron
through a same-site loopback request to this same WordPress installation
(the standard WP-Cron mechanism); this never contacts Aetos servers or any
third-party API in the free edition. The admin interface also contains a few
user-clicked links to documentation, pricing, changelog, and support on
aetosseo.com — those open only when you click them; the plugin never
requests those pages itself.
Some checks look for analytics or tag-manager fingerprints already present in
your site’s rendered HTML. The plugin may recognize strings such as
googletagmanager.com, google-analytics.com, analytics.google.com,
connect.facebook.net, clarity.ms, clarity.microsoft, plausible.io,
cdn.plausible.io, cdn.segment.com, segment.com, posthog.com, matomo.js,
matomo.php, and piwik.js, plus the matching client-side API names these tools
place in page scripts (for example gtag, fbq, and _paq). These are
detection strings only: Aetos SEO does not contact those providers, does
not send them data, and does not load their scripts. If your public pages
already include one of those scripts, the plugin records that it was detected
so the audit can avoid false “analytics missing” findings.
To put findings in context, the audit also detects which SEO, performance,
caching, security, and page-builder plugins or themes are active on your site
and reads their settings from your local WordPress database through the
standard options API. This information is shown only inside your own WordPress
admin, to explain a finding (for example, that a caching plugin controls a
header the audit flagged). It is never transmitted anywhere, and the plugin
never contacts those plugins’ vendors.
Installation
- In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins -> Add New and search for
“Aetos SEO”. - Click Install Now, then Activate.
- Open the new Aetos SEO menu in your sidebar.
- Click Start audit on the Dashboard. The first scan runs in the
background and usually finishes within a few minutes on typical shared
hosting, so you can keep working while it runs. - Open the Findings page to see the prioritized list of issues.
You do not need an account, an API key, or a third-party service to run
the audit. The free edition does everything locally inside your WordPress
install.
FAQ
-
Does it replace my SEO plugin?
-
No. Aetos SEO is an audit layer that runs alongside your existing SEO
plugin. It does not write meta titles, does not output schema, and does
not generate your sitemap. It only reads your rendered pages and reports
what it sees. -
Is the free version really useful on its own?
-
Yes. It runs a complete technical SEO and AI-readiness audit and shows
every finding it computes, with no hidden or blurred results. You control how
deep the crawl goes in Settings. -
Can I control how many pages it scans?
-
Yes. On the Aetos SEO Settings page you set how many pages the audit
analyzes (and the crawl page limit). The default is a performance-friendly 50
pages so the first scan stays light on shared hosting; set it to 0 to analyze
every page, or lower it on a very large site. The page count is controlled by
your settings. -
Does the free version send my data anywhere?
-
No. All audit work happens inside your WordPress install, using same-site
requests to read your public pages during an audit. Updates ship through
WordPress.org like any other free plugin. -
Is there a Pro version?
-
Yes, sold separately at aetosseo.com and
uploaded to your site like any premium add-on. It adds extra audit modules
and reporting workflows, all running locally inside WordPress. If you never
install Pro, the WordPress.org edition keeps working on its own. -
Will it conflict with Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO, or SEOPress?
-
No. Aetos SEO does not emit meta tags, schema, or sitemap output. It only
reads, so it cannot conflict with another SEO plugin. -
Does it support Arabic / RTL sites?
-
Yes. The admin interface auto-switches to Arabic on RTL sites, and the
audit understandslanganddirattributes when checking on-page
correctness. -
How often should I run an audit?
-
After every significant change: a redesign, a migration, a new
SEO / cache / security plugin, or a content batch. Running it weekly on a
production site is also fine. -
Does the plugin require any third-party services?
-
No. The free edition does not contact any third-party service automatically.
During an audit it performs same-site HTTP requests against your own
WordPress site to read your public pages, robots.txt, sitemaps, and internal
links. No page content leaves your server. The only external links are
documentation, pricing, changelog, and support links that open when you
click them.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Aetos SEO” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “Aetos SEO” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
4.0.2
- Addressed the WordPress.org “determine file and directory locations” review
in full: removed manual wp-admin / core path composition and every fixed
parent-directory walk across the plugin, not only the two reported lines. - Plugin, asset, and upload locations now use the WordPress public path APIs
(plugin_dir_path, plugin_dir_url, plugins_url, wp_upload_dir, plugin_basename). - Expanded the “External services” disclosure: documented the client-side
analytics API names the audit recognizes (gtag, fbq, _paq) and clarified that
detecting active SEO/performance/security/builder plugins reads their settings
only from the local database and never transmits them. - Hardened the Lite build so any of those path patterns fail the build if reintroduced.
3.3.57
- WordPress.org review feedback round: reworded audit-result description
strings so no raw tag-like text remains in code or comments (the plugin’s
own CSS / JS always loaded through wp_enqueue APIs). - Path resolution now avoids fixed directory walks and uses WordPress path
helpers for plugin-owned paths and uploads. - Removed a read of another plugin’s filter; plugin-conflict detection now
uses an internal list. All hooks, options, transients, and AJAX actions
the plugin creates use the aetos_seo_ prefix. - Removed leftover dormant Pro-edition helper code and unused CSS from the
free package; the free edition continues to show every finding in full.
3.3.52
- First public release on WordPress.org (free edition).
- Built on the mature Aetos SEO audit engine.
- Audit engine: technical SEO, crawl coverage, on-page, mobile, media,
structured data, AI-readiness (AEO / GEO), performance basics, analytics
detection, security basics. - Bilingual admin interface (Arabic / English) with full RTL support.
- Self-contained WordPress.org release with no automatic third-party service calls.
