seo/update-robots-settings changes whether WordPress discourages search engines site-wide.
Turning it on is confirm-gated, because with it on Yoast emits noindex for the whole site regardless of any per-type configuration.
At a glance
| Ability | seo/update-robots-settings |
| Toolset | Yoast SEO — toolset/yoast-seo |
| Group | Yoast SEO › Status & Tools |
| Requires | Yoast SEO, active on the site |
| Capability | manage_options |
| Safety | Writes data |
| Repeatable | Idempotent — running it twice leaves the same result |
| Ships in | AcrossAI Abilities Manager 0.0.34 and later |
This switch outranks everything else
With this on, the entire site emits noindex regardless of any other configuration. Every page, every archive, every product. Search engines drop the site from their index over the following weeks, and recovering afterwards takes considerably longer than the mistake took. Nothing on the front end indicates it — the only sign is a notice in the admin that people stop noticing.
How it works
This is WordPress’s own setting rather than Yoast’s, and it sits above everything Yoast does. No amount of per-post or per-type configuration survives it.
Turning it on is legitimate in two situations: a site under development that is publicly reachable, and a site being deliberately withdrawn. Both are real, and both are decisions rather than settings.
Turning it off is the more common need, and the more urgent. A site launched with it still on has been invisible for however long it has been live, and the fix is immediate while the recovery is not — search engines revisit on their own schedule.
After turning it off, resubmitting the sitemap in Search Console speeds up the recrawl.
Idempotent.
Input
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
discourage_search_engines | boolean | Yes | Whether WordPress tells search engines not to index the site. |
confirm | boolean | Yes — must be true | The irreversibility gate. Without it the call is refused before anything is touched. |
What comes back
| Name | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
discourage_search_engines | boolean | The state afterwards. |
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:
We launched but the site is still set to discourage search engines — fix it.
It resolves to one call:
{
"ability": "seo/update-robots-settings",
"parameters": {
"discourage_search_engines": false
}
}Worth knowing
- Overrides every other SEO setting on the site.
- Turning it off is immediate; recovery in search is not.
- Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console afterwards.
- Idempotent.
Related abilities
- Get Robots Settings — check the current state
- Get Sitemap Status — resubmit after re-enabling
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