Abilities

The abilities from Slim SEO are built on the WordPress Abilities API. They let AI agents - such as Claude or Cursor - get and update meta tags on your site.

Slim SEO uses the official MCP Adapter plugin to handle communication. The adapter translates WordPress abilities into the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that AI agents understand.

With these abilities, an AI agent can read and change meta titles, meta descriptions, social images, canonical URLs, and noindex settings for posts, terms, the homepage, archives, and default templates. This saves time when you optimize many pages or keep SEO data in sync with content changes.

Requirements

1. Use WordPress 6.9 or later. The Abilities API is part of WordPress core from that version.
2. Install and activate the MCP Adapter plugin.

Connecting AI agents to WordPress

First, connect WordPress to an AI agent via the MCP Adapter plugin. It exposes WordPress as an MCP server that AI agents can connect to.

1. Install MCP Adapter plugin

1. Download the latest release of MCP Adapter from GitHub.
2. Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, select the ZIP file, then install and activate the plugin.

You can also install it with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/WordPress/mcp-adapter/releases/latest/download/mcp-adapter.zip --activate

2. Generate application password

MCP Adapter uses Application Passwords for authentication (not your account password).

1. Go to Users → Profile.
2. Scroll to the Application Passwords section.
3. Enter a name (e.g. "MCP Agent"), then click Add New Application Password.
4. Copy the generated password - it is shown only once.

warning

An application password grants the same capabilities as the user account it belongs to. To restrict permissions, create a dedicated WordPress user with an appropriate role (e.g. Editor or Author) first, then generate an application password under that user.

3. Configure MCP clients

Configure MCP clients (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to connect to your WordPress MCP server using HTTP transport via a proxy. Use @automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote to bridge local stdio to remote WordPress HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wordpress-http": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote@latest"
      ],
      "env": {
        "WP_API_URL": "http://your-site.com/wp-json/mcp/mcp-adapter-default-server",
        "LOG_FILE": "/path/to/logs/mcp-adapter.log",
        "WP_API_USERNAME": "your-username",
        "WP_API_PASSWORD": "your-application-password"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace:

• The domain in WP_API_URL with your site domain
• WP_API_USERNAME with your WordPress username
• WP_API_PASSWORD with the Application Password from Step 2
• LOG_FILE with the path where logs should be written

For more details, follow the instructions in the MCP Adapter GitHub repository.

Slim SEO marks its meta tag abilities as public MCP tools. After setup, the agent discovers them and can call them.

Available abilities

Slim SEO registers these abilities in the slim-seo category:

Ability	Purpose
slim-seo/get-post-meta-tags	Get meta tags for a post
slim-seo/update-post-meta-tags	Update meta tags for a post
slim-seo/get-term-meta-tags	Get meta tags for a term
slim-seo/update-term-meta-tags	Update meta tags for a term
slim-seo/get-default-meta-tags	Get default meta tags for a post type, taxonomy, or author archives
slim-seo/update-default-meta-tags	Update default meta tags for a post type, taxonomy, or author archives
slim-seo/get-homepage-meta-tags	Get meta tags for the homepage
slim-seo/update-homepage-meta-tags	Update meta tags for the homepage
slim-seo/get-post-type-archive-meta-tags	Get meta tags for a post type archive
slim-seo/update-post-type-archive-meta-tags	Update meta tags for a post type archive

Meta tag fields

Get abilities return these fields when they apply to the context:

Field	Description
title	Meta title
description	Meta description
facebook_image	Open Graph image URL
x_image	X (Twitter) image URL
canonical	Canonical URL (posts and terms only)
noindex	Whether search engines must exclude the page (true or false)

For text fields, each get response uses this shape:

{
  "raw": "{{ post.title }} {{ sep }} {{ site.title }}",
  "rendered": "Hello World - My Site"
}

• raw is the stored value. It can contain dynamic variables.
• rendered is the value after Slim SEO replaces the variables.

Update abilities accept plain strings for text fields. They accept a boolean for noindex. An update changes only the fields you send. Other fields stay unchanged.

A successful update returns true.