seo/update-crawl-settings controls what WordPress emits into the page head and what it lets crawlers reach: the RSD, WLW, shortlink and REST head links, feeds, emoji scripts, oEmbed, the generator tag, and which query parameters are denied.
Removing things shrinks what search engines crawl. It also breaks anything that consumes them, so change one at a time.
At a glance
| Ability | seo/update-crawl-settings |
| Toolset | Yoast SEO — toolset/yoast-seo |
| Group | Yoast SEO › Settings |
| 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 |
Most of it is genuinely dead; some of it is not
RSD and WLW are for Windows Live Writer and Real Simple Discovery, both long dead. Removing them is free.
The generator tag announces the WordPress version. Removing it is mild security hygiene and costs nothing.
Feeds are where care is needed. Plenty of sites have feeds nobody reads — and plenty have a feed powering somebody’s newsletter, a partner’s aggregator, or a podcast. Disabling those breaks something that produces no error on this site at all.
oEmbed is the same shape: removing it means other sites can no longer embed pages from this one, which is invisible here and visible to them.
REST head links are the riskiest. The REST API itself keeps working, but tooling that discovers the endpoint from the head — including some editors and integrations — stops finding it.
Denied query parameters stop crawlers following URLs with tracking parameters, which is genuinely useful on a site with campaign links generating thousands of duplicate URLs.
One at a time, because everything here fails somewhere other than on this site.
Idempotent.
Input
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
settings | object | Yes | A map of setting key to new value. Keys outside this area are refused. |
What comes back
| Name | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
updated | array | The keys that changed. |
settings | object | The area after the write. |
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:
Remove the WordPress generator tag and the RSD link.
It resolves to one call:
{
"ability": "seo/update-crawl-settings",
"parameters": {
"settings": { "remove_generator": true, "remove_rsd_wlw_links": true }
}
}Worth knowing
- RSD, WLW and the generator tag are free to remove.
- Feeds and oEmbed break things on other people’s sites, silently.
- REST head links break endpoint discovery for some tooling.
- Change one at a time.
Related abilities
- Get SEO Settings — read the crawl area first
- Get Robots Settings — the other side of what crawlers see
Get the plugins:
AcrossAI Abilities Manager · AcrossAI MCP Manager
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