Native AEO Pack

Description

Native AEO Pack brings together everything a WordPress site needs for technical SEO without installing a heavyweight all-in-one plugin. It is built around WordPress native features (wp_robots, wp_sitemaps_*, register_post_meta, the Block Editor sidebar) and stays out of your way: no custom database tables, no cron jobs, no third-party calls beyond a cached Gravatar lookup.

Three modules — Meta Tags, NoIndex and Sitemap — that you can toggle independently from a single settings page.

Meta tags and social cards

• Document title and meta description on home, singulars, taxonomy archives and author archives, auto-generated from the content you already have (post title, excerpt, term description, user biographical info).
• Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type, og:site_name).
• Twitter Card tags (summary_large_image when an image is available, summary otherwise).
• Article + BreadcrumbList JSON-LD on posts and pages for Google rich results.
• Person JSON-LD on author archives with sameAs from user profile social URLs (E-E-A-T).
• Smart image detection for og:image: per-post override → featured image → WooCommerce gallery → first inline image in the content → fallback Open Graph image.
• Customizable: max length of auto-generated descriptions, home description override, fallback Open Graph image, site-wide Twitter @username and Facebook App ID, publisher logo for Article schema.
• Per-post overrides in the post sidebar: meta title (also replaces the document title), meta description, Open Graph image.
• Author social URLs: fields added to the user profile (Twitter/X, LinkedIn, GitHub, Mastodon, Instagram, YouTube) used as sameAs in Person schema.

Robots directives (noindex / nofollow)

• Bulk noindex / nofollow by post type — Set entire post types (pages, posts, products, etc.) as noindex, nofollow or both with a single checkbox per directive.
• Bulk noindex / nofollow by taxonomy — Set entire taxonomy archives (categories, tags, product attributes, etc.) as noindex, nofollow or both. Works with all public taxonomies, including WooCommerce product categories, tags and attributes.
• Smart exclusions — When a post type or taxonomy is set to noindex or nofollow, exclude specific posts or terms that should keep the default behavior. Exclusions work independently per directive.
• Individual noindex / nofollow — Set noindex or nofollow on specific posts or taxonomy terms without affecting the entire content type or taxonomy.
• Instant search — Find content and terms quickly with a live search field in the settings page. Click to add, click to remove.
• Link-level nofollow — A nofollow checkbox in the Classic Editor link popup lets you mark individual links with rel="nofollow" without leaving the editor. The Block Editor already exposes a native nofollow toggle in its link popover.
• Quick Edit — Toggle noindex and nofollow directly from the post list table without opening the editor.
• Bulk actions — Set or remove noindex and nofollow on multiple posts at once from the post list.
• Robots column — Two color-coded icons in your content lists show the current index/follow state at a glance.
• Search results noindex / nofollow — Prevent internal search result pages from being indexed and/or having their links followed.
• 404 pages noindex / nofollow — Keep 404 error pages out of search indexes and stop crawlers from following dead-end links.
• Date archives noindex / nofollow — Apply either or both directives to daily, monthly and yearly archive pages.
• Paginated archives noindex / nofollow — Apply either or both directives to /page/2/, /page/3/ and beyond, including Query Loop block pagination on block themes.
• Attachment pages noindex / nofollow — Apply either or both directives to media attachment pages.
• Author archives noindex / nofollow — Apply either or both directives to author archive pages.
• RSS feeds noindex / nofollow — Granular control to noindex and/or nofollow RSS feeds by type: main feed, taxonomy feeds, author feeds, site comments feed and per-post comments feeds. Works via the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header since feeds are XML.

Priority logic (applies independently to noindex and nofollow):

1. Individual directive always applies.
2. Post type / taxonomy bulk directive applies unless the post or term is specifically excluded.
3. Exclusions override the bulk setting for specific posts or terms.

Native XML sitemap control

• Exclude post types from the native wp-sitemap.xml.
• Exclude taxonomies entirely from the sitemap.
• User control — exclude specific user roles, individual users, or disable the entire users sitemap for single-author sites.
• Flexible content exclusions — exclude posts and pages by ID or by slug patterns; exclude taxonomy terms by ID or by slug fragments.
• Lastmod dates — adds last-modification dates to every URL in the sitemap and to every entry in the sitemap index (Google’s most used optional field).
• Smart redirects — automatically redirect old sitemap URLs left over by other SEO and sitemap plugins (Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, Google XML Sitemaps, Jetpack and others) to the native WordPress sitemap (301), so you don’t lose crawl signals when switching.
• Static sitemap detector — spots leftover sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml, news-sitemap.xml and similar files in your WordPress root that silently override the native sitemap, and helps you remove them.
• Performance — customize the maximum number of URLs per sitemap (1–50,000).
• Noindex-aware — content marked as noindex by the NoIndex module is automatically excluded from the sitemap, so search engines won’t even find it there.

Block Editor integrated

A single sidebar panel in the Block Editor exposes everything you need per post:

• Meta title (also replaces the document title).
• Meta description.
• Open Graph image (with media picker and live preview).
• noindex toggle.
• nofollow toggle.

The panel is implemented as a PluginDocumentSettingPanel — fully compatible with WordPress collaborative editing.

Classic Editor compatible

When the Block Editor is disabled for a post type, all the per-post controls are exposed as a single Classic Editor meta box with the same fields. Quick Edit and Bulk Actions on the post list provide the noindex/nofollow toggles without opening the editor.

Zero database tables

Native AEO Pack uses standard WordPress options and post/term/user meta tables. No custom tables, no cron jobs, no scheduled background processes, no external API calls beyond a cached Gravatar avatar probe (24h TTL) for E-E-A-T author images.

Replaces full SEO plugins, doesn’t coexist with them

Native AEO Pack is not designed to run alongside Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework or Slim SEO. Running two SEO plugins emits duplicate <head> tags and hurts your SEO. If Native AEO Pack detects one of these active it will warn you on the settings page — you should keep one and deactivate the other.

If you want full keyword analysis, redirect managers, content scoring and dozens more features, stick with your current SEO suite. If you want the essentials, fast and native, Native AEO Pack is for you.

Perfect companions

Native AEO Pack is fully independent — these plugins aren’t required — but they pair really well with it:

• VigIA — AI visibility, crawler analytics, Site Identity JSON-LD on the home page. Native AEO Pack coordinates @id references with VigIA so both can emit schema without duplicating the Organization or WebSite nodes.
• AI Share & Summarize — share buttons for social networks and AI assistants. Helps your content reach both audiences and language models.
• AI Content Signals — control how AI systems can use your content (training, search, both) through robots.txt directives endorsed by Cloudflare.
• Vigilante — all-in-one WordPress security: firewall, login protection, security headers, 2FA, file integrity monitoring.

External services

This plugin connects to Gravatar (operated by Automattic Inc.) to check whether the post or page author has a public Gravatar avatar, so it can be exposed in Open Graph tags (og:image) and in Person JSON-LD (image) for E-E-A-T.

What data is sent and when:

• When a singular view is rendered and the Open Graph module is active, and no other image source exists (per-post og:image, featured image, WooCommerce gallery image, inline content image), the plugin sends an MD5 hash of the lowercased and trimmed author email to https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=404 via wp_remote_head() (HEAD request, no body).
• When an author archive is rendered and the Person schema module is active, the same probe is performed for that author.
• The original email address is never sent — only an MD5 hash, which is the standard Gravatar lookup mechanism.
• The result (found / not found) is cached for 24 hours in a transient so subsequent page loads do not hit Gravatar again.

This is the same mechanism WordPress itself uses to display Gravatar avatars in comments. Gravatar’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/