About this plugin
Ranklance is a WordPress plugin for SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). It scores your pages for AI answer engines, audits your site for technical SEO issues, and gives you full control over meta tags, schema, sitemaps, and robots directives — for both traditional search engines and AI-powered answer engines.
What the free plugin does
- On-site crawler + Technical SEO audit — finds broken links, redirect chains, missing tags, and on-page issues, ranked by impact. Findings appear as a read-only list of recommendations.
- AEO score — every page is scored across eight dimensions: Answer Readiness, Schema Coverage, Entity and Link Clarity, FAQ/HowTo Presence, Content Structure, E-E-A-T Signals, Snippet Readiness, and Freshness.
- AI-assisted analysis (optional) — add your own Anthropic (Claude) API key to enrich the AEO score and entity analysis with AI. Analysis only; no content is sent to Anthropic unless you provide a key and tick the consent box. Without a key, scoring runs rule-based.
- Meta title and description editor — per-post SEO title and meta description with a live search-result preview.
- Schema / JSON-LD engine — outputs clean structured data (Article, BreadcrumbList, Organization, and more) as a single @graph in the page head.
- XML sitemap — a fast sitemap that respects your noindex settings.
- Robots meta directives and Open Graph / Twitter Cards — control indexing and social preview tags.
- Meta tag conflict detection — warns when another SEO plugin is emitting competing tags.
- Google Search Console — connect your own GSC property (bring-your-own OAuth credentials) to see real search performance.
- Import — bring your existing SEO settings over from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or All in One SEO.
- Title and meta templates — set default titles and descriptions with variables such as %title%, %category%, and %sitename%.
- robots.txt editor — edit your site’s virtual robots.txt without touching files.
- Readability score — a readability rating for every post, shown in the post list.
- Breadcrumbs — a Breadcrumbs block and template tag, with matching BreadcrumbList schema.
- Redirect manager — 301, 302, 307, and 410 redirects, regex rules, redirect-chain detection, and CSV import/export.
- 404 monitor — see which missing URLs visitors hit and redirect them in one click.
- Content blocks — Table of Contents, FAQ, HowTo, and custom Schema blocks; FAQ and HowTo blocks output FAQPage and HowTo structured data automatically.
- Local business schema — LocalBusiness structured data with your name, address, and phone number.
- llms.txt and llms-full.txt — help AI answer engines understand your site’s key content.
- Instant indexing (optional) — notify Bing and Yandex via IndexNow, and Google via the Indexing API, when you publish, update, or remove content.
Ranklance Pro
The free edition analyzes; Pro turns that analysis into automatic execution — an AI agent team that generates fixes and an approval queue that applies them to your live site with one click, plus:
- AI agents for schema, on-page optimization, internal linking, content refresh, and llms.txt.
- An approval queue that applies approved changes automatically.
- Third-party data: Ahrefs, Semrush, and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- AEO monitoring and AI-citation tracking, scheduled PDF reports, and agency multi-site management.
net/.
External Services This Plugin Connects To
Ranklance connects to external services to provide its features. All connections are initiated by the site administrator and require explicit setup. No data is transmitted without configuration.
Google Search Console
0 authentication. Data received: impressions, clicks, CTR, position per page, crawl errors. Connection occurs during OAuth setup and on scheduled syncs.
com/terms
Google PageSpeed Insights API (optional)
dev/ — Public page URLs are submitted for performance analysis during a Technical SEO audit run. com/terms
Google Rich Results Test API (optional)
com/test/rich-results — JSON-LD markup is submitted for schema validation, on demand from the post editor. com/terms
Anthropic Claude API (optional, bring-your-own key)
com — Used only for AI-assisted AEO analysis, and only when you supply your own Anthropic API key AND enable the data-sharing consent toggle in Settings → Integrations. When enabled, page content (titles and body text) is sent to Anthropic for analysis. Nothing is sent without both the key and explicit consent; with neither, the plugin uses rule-based analysis and contacts no AI service.
com/legal/consumer-terms
IndexNow — Bing and Yandex (optional, off by default)
com/indexnow each time it is published, updated, or removed, together with your site’s IndexNow key. No other content is sent. com/legal/rules/
Google Indexing API (optional, off by default)
com when it is published, updated, or removed. No other content is sent. The service-account key is stored encrypted.
com/terms
Development
Ranklance is open source (GPLv2+). The complete, human-readable source for every compiled asset is included in the plugin package, and the build is fully reproducible.
Build tooling: @wordpress/scripts (webpack) for the block-editor bundles, and Terser / cssnano for the classic admin assets.
Compiled files and their sources:
- assets/build/editorial-sidebar.js is built from assets/js/gutenberg/editorial-sidebar.js
- assets/build/meta-editor-sidebar.js is built from assets/js/gutenberg/meta-editor-sidebar.js
- assets/js/*.min.js are minified from the matching assets/js/*.js sources
- assets/css/*.min.css are minified from the matching assets/css/*.css sources
To regenerate the compiled assets from source:
npm install npm run build
json (both included in the package), so the compiled assets can be regenerated directly from the included source.