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OnlyAI SEO vs Yoast SEO: an honest comparison
Other plugin's public pages read 13 October 2026
What each plugin does, where Yoast SEO is the safer choice, where OnlyAI SEO is different (scores and ranked fixes, agents with an Inbox, AI search visibility), and how to switch.
Yoast SEO is the best-known WordPress SEO plugin. OnlyAI SEO is much newer and works differently: instead of a traffic light inside each post, it scores every post, ranks the fixes across your whole site by impact, and has agents that leave suggestions in an Inbox for you to approve. This page says where each fits.
The short version
- Choose Yoast SEO if you want the most established plugin, a very large community and the paid add-ons it sells (News, Local, Video, WooCommerce).
- Choose OnlyAI SEO if you want to know which posts to fix first, want suggestions about old and underperforming posts without anything changing behind your back, and care about being readable by AI search (llms.txt, Markdown copies, crawler rules).
- Use both for a while if you are unsure: OnlyAI SEO scores and reports while Yoast SEO keeps printing your tags.
At a glance
| OnlyAI SEO | Yoast SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | The plugin is free. OnlyAI Cloud (the AI) has a free plan of 10 requests a day; Pro is $10 a month (regular $19) for 100 a day, Agency $49 a month (regular $99) for 1,000 a day. | Free plugin, plus Yoast SEO Premium billed yearly and a separate, higher-priced WooCommerce plan. See their pricing. |
| AI help | Titles, descriptions, ideas, link suggestions, alt text and 1-click SEO from OnlyAI Cloud, counted per request. | Premium lists unlimited AI features, labelled beta, for titles and meta descriptions. |
| Redirects | Free: 301, 302, 307 and 410 rules, regex, a 404 monitor and an automatic 301 when a slug changes. | Redirect Manager is a Premium feature. |
| Internal links | Free: live link suggestions in the editor, 1-click links, links from older posts to a new one. | Internal linking tool is a Premium feature. |
| AI search | Free: llms.txt, Markdown copy of every post, per-crawler rules, visit counts. | An llms.txt feature is in the free plugin (their pricing page says it was released in June). |
| News, video, local | News and video sitemaps; local business and author structured data. | News SEO, Local SEO and Video SEO are included in Premium. |
| Whole-site view | A score on every post, a ranked list of what to fix next, an Inbox of agent suggestions. | Analysis inside each post; SEO workouts in Premium. |
Where OnlyAI SEO is different
- It measures the whole site. Every post gets a score in All Posts, you can sort and filter by it, and the Overview lists the next fix by impact and time.
- Ten agents, one Inbox. Refresher, Keyword Scout, Link Builder, Auditor, AI Visibility, Rank Digest, Evergreen Renewer, CTR Fixer, Link & 404 Keeper and Cannibalization Resolver read your data and propose changes. A proposal changes nothing until you press its button. The one exception, switched off by default, is scheduled renewals of old evergreen posts on the paid plans, which keep the previous version and offer Undo.
- Search Console and Analytics with one sign-in, used by the agents to find quick wins, titles that earn too few clicks and pages competing for one query.
- 1-click SEO fills in keyword, title, description, URL, alt text, headings, FAQ, links and tags in the editor from a single AI request, and Undo restores everything.
- Page builders: Elementor, Bricks, Divi, WPBakery and Avada pages are read as the pages they are.
Where Yoast SEO is the better choice
- A far larger user base, longer track record, more tutorials and more people who already know it.
- Paid add-ons for News, Local, Video and WooCommerce that are mature products in their own right.
- No account or cloud service is needed for its core features. OnlyAI SEO's scoring and agents also run on your own site, but the AI buttons need an OnlyAI Cloud key.
- If a client, agency or editor team already works in Yoast's interface, switching has a training cost.
Switching from Yoast SEO
You do not have to choose in one go. OnlyAI SEO can be installed next to Yoast SEO: it scores your posts and gives you the ranked list of fixes straight away, and it prints title and description tags only once the other SEO plugin is deactivated, so nothing is printed twice.
- Install and activate OnlyAI SEO. The setup guide opens (every step can be skipped).
- Open OnlyAI SEO, Settings, Import. It reads Yoast SEO's saved data and shows a preview first. Nothing is written until you confirm, and a field you already filled in is never overwritten.
- Deactivate Yoast SEO when the preview looks right. OnlyAI SEO takes over the title and description tags. Yoast's own redirects live in its Premium Redirect Manager, so export or recreate them before you deactivate it.
Copied: each post's SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, noindex and nofollow flags, canonical URL and social card. Not copied: redirects, structured data you set up by hand, and category or tag settings, so check those before you deactivate the old plugin. More in the FAQ.
Sources: Yoast SEO pricing page.