taxonomies/list-term-seo returns a page of terms in one taxonomy with their Yoast SEO data.
It exists so that finding the terms without a description does not mean a call per term.
At a glance
| Ability | taxonomies/list-term-seo |
| Toolset | Yoast SEO — toolset/yoast-seo |
| Group | Yoast SEO › Term SEO |
| Requires | Yoast SEO, active on the site |
| Capability | manage_options |
| Safety | Read-only — changes nothing |
| Repeatable | Idempotent — running it twice leaves the same result |
| Ships in | AcrossAI Abilities Manager 0.0.34 and later |
How it works
Term archives are a large part of most sites’ indexed pages and a routinely neglected one. A blog with forty categories has forty archive pages, and on most sites none of them has a description.
Those pages then take their meta description from the taxonomy template, which produces forty pages with near-identical descriptions — a pattern search engines handle by ignoring most of them.
Listing the terms with their SEO data makes the gap visible in one call, which is what turns “we should write category descriptions” into a specific list of which ones.
Yoast stores term SEO in a single wpseo_taxonomy_meta option keyed by taxonomy and term, not in term meta. Anything reading term meta finds nothing, and anything writing term meta is writing somewhere Yoast never looks.
Paging with limit and offset, because a large taxonomy can have thousands of terms.
Input
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
taxonomy | string | Yes | The taxonomy. |
limit | integer | No | How many terms to return. |
offset | integer | No | Where to start. |
What comes back
| Name | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
terms | array | Each term with its Yoast SEO fields. |
total | integer | How many terms the taxonomy has. |
success | boolean | Whether the call completed. |
message | string | A one-line summary of what happened, suitable for showing a human. |
error_code | string | Present only on failure — a stable machine-readable reason, such as a missing field, a wrong field type or an unmet confirmation. |
Example
Ask your assistant:
Which of our categories have no meta description?
It resolves to one call:
{
"ability": "taxonomies/list-term-seo",
"parameters": {
"taxonomy": "category",
"limit": 100
}
}Worth knowing
- Term archives are often the largest neglected group of indexed pages on a site.
- Terms with no description fall back to the taxonomy template, producing near-duplicates.
- Paged — large taxonomies have thousands of terms.
- Read-only.
Related abilities
- Update Term SEO — fill in the gaps
- Get Taxonomy SEO Settings — the template they fall back to
Get the plugins:
AcrossAI Abilities Manager · AcrossAI MCP Manager
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