seo/get-robots-settings reports everything affecting what crawlers are told: whether WordPress itself is discouraging search engines, and Yoast’s per-content-type noindex flags.
It is the first place to look when a site has vanished from search.
At a glance
| Ability | seo/get-robots-settings |
| Toolset | Yoast SEO — toolset/yoast-seo |
| Group | Yoast SEO › Status & Tools |
| 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
WordPress has a single setting — discourage search engines — that emits noindex for the entire site regardless of any other configuration. It is switched on by default during development on many hosts and on many staging environments.
A site launched without turning it off is invisible to search engines, completely, and the only indication is a small notice in the admin that people stop seeing after a week.
That situation persists for months on real sites. It is the single most consequential setting in SEO and it lives in WordPress rather than in Yoast, which is exactly why it gets missed.
So this reads it alongside Yoast’s own flags, because “what are we telling crawlers” is one question and the answer lives in two places.
The per-type flags are the other half: a content type noindexed at the Yoast level is absent from search and from the sitemap, which is correct for internal types and a significant omission when it is not.
Input
This ability takes no input.
What comes back
| Name | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
discourage_search_engines | boolean | WordPress’s own site-wide switch. True means the whole site is noindexed. |
noindex_flags | object | Yoast’s per-content-type noindex settings. |
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:
Our site has disappeared from Google — what are we telling crawlers?
It resolves to one call:
{
"ability": "seo/get-robots-settings",
"parameters": {}
}Worth knowing
- The WordPress switch overrides everything. Check it first.
- It is on by default in many development and staging setups.
- Yoast’s per-type flags also remove content from the sitemap.
- Read-only.
Related abilities
- Update Robots Settings — change the site-wide switch
- Update Archive And Indexing Settings — the per-type flags
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