4,200 products. No meta descriptions.
That's a queue problem.
Every SEO plugin's AI feature works one post at a time, inside the editor. Metaly is built for the other case — a catalogue or an archive that nobody is ever going to hand-optimise — and it writes the result into Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress rather than replacing them.
- Writes into the SEO plugin you already run
- The coverage audit is free and unmetered
- Not another SEO framework
- capabilities built and tested
- 9capabilities built and tested
- specified, not built yet
- 4specified, not built yet
- SEO host detection and write-back for Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress
- Standalone storage and rendering for sites running no SEO plugin
- Coverage audit: missing meta descriptions and SEO titles per post type
- SEO plugins written into
- 4SEO plugins written into
- Metadata fields audited
- 3Metadata fields audited
- The coverage audit, on every tier
- FreeThe coverage audit, on every tier
- Free and open source
- GPLFree and open source
Why Metaly
Fill the gap you already have.
Not the one a tool invented.
The incumbent SEO plugins are good at what they own. None of them answers the question a 4,000-product catalogue actually asks, because answering it one editor screen at a time is not an answer.
Writes into your SEO plugin, not over it
Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress own sitemaps, redirects, schema and the meta box. Metaly fills in their fields and leaves the rest of the category alone — or stores metadata itself and renders it, on a site running no SEO plugin at all.
Built for bulk from the first line
The unit of work is a catalogue, not a post. Batching runs on the same queue the platform already uses for translation, so a run measured in thousands of items is the expected case rather than the one that times out.
The audit is the free front door
Finding the gap is unmetered on every tier, including with no licence at all. You get the count — how many posts have no description, how many images have no alt text — before there is anything to pay for.
Deliberately narrow
No sitemaps, no redirects, no rank tracking, no keyword research, no schema framework. Those belong to the incumbents, and a plugin that grows into all of them is the thing this shelf exists not to build.
What is built today
The measuring half, in full
Every capability below is implemented and tested in the plugin as it stands. What is specified but not built is listed further down, on purpose.
Whole-library coverage audit
Counts what is missing across every post type: posts with no meta description, posts with no SEO title, and images with no alt text. The numbers come from your database, not an estimate.
Yoast's indexable table, handled
Since Yoast 14 the frontend reads its own indexables table, not postmeta. Writing postmeta alone leaves a stale indexable and the change appears not to take — the likeliest way for this kind of integration to look broken while being correct.
AIOSEO's custom table, handled
AIOSEO does not use postmeta at all — its own table, its own model class. The host interface is drawn around that shape rather than generalised from Yoast, because a postmeta-shaped interface cannot fit it.
One query where one query is possible
The postmeta-backed hosts can count coverage gaps in a single LEFT JOIN. AIOSEO cannot, so the audit falls back to paginated iteration for it rather than forcing every host down the slow path.
Conflict detection
Two SEO plugins active at once is common, and it decides which one actually renders your title. The audit reports the conflict — it is the likeliest explanation for metadata that was written correctly and still did not change the page.
Admin screen and REST route
The coverage report has a screen in wp-admin and an authenticated REST route behind a real capability check, so the numbers are scriptable as well as readable.
How it works
Two steps that work, two that don't yet
Shown end to end so the shape is clear — with the unbuilt steps marked as unbuilt rather than written in the present tense.
- 01
Install alongside your SEO plugin
Metaly detects which SEO plugin the site runs — Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress — and binds to it. On a site running none, it stores and renders the metadata itself.
- 02
Run the coverage audit
It counts what is missing across your whole library, per post type, plus images with no alt text. Free and unmetered, with or without a licence.
- 03
Queue the gap for generation
Select from the audit, and Metaly plans the run and prices it before dispatching anything. Batches go through the same queue the platform already runs, so a catalogue-sized job is the expected case.
- 04
Review, apply, roll back
Generated metadata lands in a review queue rather than straight onto the site. Approve per item, apply into your SEO plugin's own fields, and revert the whole run from the write journal if you do not like it.
Use it before it ships
Free tools and guides, working today
The measuring half of this product, running in your browser against your own data, plus what we have learned writing metadata at this scale. No signup, no plugin, and useful whether or not Metaly ever ships.
Free tools
Pixel-accurate SERP snippet preview, and a bulk checker that finds every truncated, missing or duplicated row across a whole catalogue.
ExploreGuides
Writing metadata for a catalogue rather than a page — what to triage, how to template without producing duplicates, and what the accessibility standard requires of alt text.
ExploreBuild status
What ships, and what doesn't
This section is not a roadmap teaser. It is the list you would want if you were deciding whether to depend on this.
Metaly is not released — there is no download yet — but it is no longer only a measuring tool. Bulk title and description generation, the review queue and batch rollback are implemented and tested alongside the audit and the write-back layer. What remains unbuilt is listed beside it, because the list is the reason to trust the rest.
Implemented and tested
- SEO host detection and write-back for Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress
- Standalone storage and rendering for sites running no SEO plugin
- Coverage audit: missing meta descriptions and SEO titles per post type
- Image alt-text coverage across the media library
- Conflict reporting when two SEO plugins are active at once
- Bulk title and meta description generation, planned and priced before dispatch
- A review queue with per-item decisions, and rollback of a whole run
- Admin screens and REST routes for the audit, the gaps and a run
- Licensing, metered in items, on the shared WP Shelf platform
Specified, not built
- Bulk image alt text — the service accepts the item type, the plugin does not offer it yet
- Open Graph and Twitter card fields
- Per-language metadata via Gloty
- A public release: no WordPress.org listing and no download
Why there are no prices here
Metaly meters in items — one item is one generated meta set, or one image caption — and the coverage audit stays free and unmetered on every tier, including with no licence. There are no prices on this page because the plan ladder is not calibrated yet: item counts become real quotas the moment a licence is issued against them, and the per-item cost of a vision call and a text call are not the same number. Publishing a figure before it is measured would be a commitment made out of guesswork.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Metaly is a WordPress plugin for bulk AI SEO metadata: titles and meta descriptions generated in batches and written into whichever SEO plugin the site already runs — Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress. As of plugin version 0.16.0 the coverage audit, the write-back layer, bulk generation, the review queue and batch rollback are implemented and tested. Image alt text and Open Graph fields are not built yet, and there is no public release.
Not yet. Metaly is not released and there is no download or WordPress.org listing. The plugin itself is considerably further along than that suggests — audit, write-back, bulk generation, review and rollback are all implemented and tested — but until it ships there is nothing to install. The free tools on this site work today and need no plugin.
Four: Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) and SEOPress. Metaly writes into that plugin's own fields, so the metadata renders exactly as if it had been typed into the meta box by hand. On a site running no SEO plugin at all, Metaly stores the metadata itself and renders it.
No, and it is designed not to. Sitemaps, redirects, schema, breadcrumbs and the editor meta box belong to those plugins, and Metaly does none of them. It fills in the title and description fields they already own, in bulk, and is useless without one installed — or falls back to storing and rendering the metadata itself.
That is not decided, so this page does not say. Metaly meters in items, where one item is one generated meta set, and the coverage audit is free and unmetered on every tier including with no licence. The plan ladder is deliberately unpublished until item counts have been calibrated against measured per-item provider cost — a vision call for alt text and a text call for a description do not cost the same, and a tier that is underwater at full quota is expensive to reverse.
That is the intent when Gloty is also installed, by routing through Gloty's translation path, and it is not built yet. It is an optional, feature-detected integration rather than a dependency in either direction: Metaly is meant to be fully useful on a monolingual site with no Gloty, and Gloty does not need Metaly.
No. That is Citely, a separate WP Shelf plugin for AI visibility. The two were one product in an earlier draft and were split deliberately: the audiences overlap but the buying trigger does not — one is a catalogue with no metadata, the other is a site that answer engines cannot quote.
WordPress 6.4 or later and PHP 8.1 or later, the same baseline as every WP Shelf plugin. Metaly is GPLv2-licensed.
Not on sale yet.
The measuring half already runs in your browser, free and without a plugin. Metaly is being built in the open on the same platform as Gloty, and generation now works — what it will cost is still being measured against real per-item provider spend before anything is priced. The audit stays free either way.