AI SEO Tools – Alt Text, Meta Descriptions, Schema & AI Content

2.0.4

A rebuild around a single AI client, a shared job queue and a new admin interface.

New
* Anthropic, Google Gemini and OpenRouter support alongside OpenAI, switchable without losing your settings.
* OpenRouter puts hundreds of models behind one key, including free tiers. Its live per-model prices are fetched with the model list and feed the spend counter directly, instead of a built-in price table.
* Draft writer: turn a topic, a headline or a list of briefs into posts, complete with tags and a search snippet, authored by you. Drafts by default, with a Publish immediately option and a --publish flag for WP-CLI. Roles that cannot publish submit for review instead.
* Search snippets module: SEO titles and meta descriptions written into Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO, with a live preview and character budgets.
* Structured data module: Article, FAQ and HowTo JSON-LD, built from what the page actually says. Dates, author, permalink and featured image come from WordPress, never from the model.
* Internal links module: anchor suggestions taken from phrases already in the post, inserted only where you approve them.
* Content refresh is now fully implemented, with a word-level diff, selective apply and undo. Previously it was a disabled placeholder.
* Spend tracking per module, plus a monthly cap that pauses bulk runs before they surprise you.
* Activity log with one-click undo for every change the plugin makes.
* WP-CLI commands: alt, tags, meta, schema, write, usage and queue.
* API keys can be defined in wp-config.php (AI_SEO_TOOLS_OPENAI_KEY and friends) instead of being stored in the database.
* Tags now work on pages, custom post types and WooCommerce products, not just posts.
* Alt text can find and rewrite weak alt text — file names, IMG_1234, one-word placeholders — not only fill in missing alt text.
* Tag language and alt text language can be set independently.
* New plugin icon, with a flat single-colour variant for the admin menu so it tints correctly with every admin colour scheme.
* Filters throughout for prompts, models, pricing, image size, post types, taxonomies and every generated result.

Improved
* Images are downscaled to a configurable dimension before being sent, cutting request size, cost and memory use dramatically compared with sending the original upload.
* Alt text prompts now include the file name, caption, the page the image appears on and that page’s focus keyword.
* Structured responses use JSON schema output where the provider supports it. OpenRouter also restates the schema in the prompt and retries without response_format, because support varies per model there.
* Reasoning models are handled: when one spends its whole output budget thinking and returns nothing, the request is retried automatically with far more headroom rather than reported as a failure.
* Rate limits and outages are retried with backoff and honour Retry-After; bulk runs requeue the item instead of dropping it. OpenRouter rate-limit errors now explain that free tiers share tight limits.
* One shared queue replaces four per-module cron loops, with configurable batch size and a loopback nudge so runs progress on low-traffic sites.
* Library statistics use indexed COUNT queries instead of loading every attachment ID into memory.
* Alt text is trimmed on a word boundary, and a refusal is detected through the model’s own confidence flag rather than matching an English phrase, which never survived translation.
* Redesigned admin interface on a dark surface of its own, which does not follow the system colour scheme. Metaboxes and list-table controls stay light, matching the WordPress screens they sit inside.
* Requires WordPress 6.5 or newer and PHP 8.1 or newer; tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Fixed
* All in One SEO metadata is read and written through its own table rather than an unused post meta key.
* With no SEO plugin installed, the fallback title and description were written but never read back, so coverage always reported them as missing.
* Deactivating or uninstalling left scheduled jobs behind: alt text jobs and queue ticks are scheduled with arguments, which wp_clear_scheduled_hook() does not match.
* A completed bulk run made its tab reload endlessly, because the runner treated the finished state on a fresh page load as a reason to refresh.
* Headings, links and table cells inherited WordPress core’s dark text colour and became unreadable on the dark surface.
* Select controls turned their text black on hover, from a core rule that outranked the plugin’s own.
* Editor metaboxes rendered dark inside the light block editor sidebar.
* The connection test asked for so few tokens that a working key looked broken on a reasoning model.
* Uninstall removes the plugin’s options, transients, tables, post meta and scheduled events, while leaving alt text, tags and meta descriptions in place — that content belongs to the site, not the plugin.
* Modules are declared explicitly instead of being derived from file names, so a typo fails loudly rather than silently loading nothing.

2.0.3

• Maintenance release.