Bearius SEO Light

Bearius SEO Light gives a site the SEO groundwork it actually needs, without the weight. It is made for news sites, publishers and multilingual sites, and the features big suites often sell as add-ons, such as the Google News sitemap, are included for free.

There is no traffic light scoring of your writing and no keyword density. The audit reports facts you can check: something is missing, duplicated or blocking search engines, with a plain explanation and, where the plugin can fix it itself, a one click fix.

“Light” means light to run: every module can be switched off, and a module that is off loads no code.

Highlights

• Google News sitemap for free, one file per language
• XML sitemaps for every language of the site, with Bearius Multilingual, Polylang, WPML and TranslatePress
• A switch for every AI crawler, with a plain explanation of training versus AI search
• An audit that fetches your pages on desktop and on mobile and finds duplicated tags, maintenance pages and missing language links
• One click fixes, always with a note of what exactly changes
• An editor box with live previews of the search result and the share card, plus checks of the post
• Interface in English, Polish, German, Spanish and French, following the language of each user’s profile

Meta tags and structured data

• Meta description, canonical link, Open Graph and X Card tags, each one switchable
• Correct canonical links on paginated archives and on posts split into pages
• Schema.org data as one connected graph: Organization, WebSite with search action, Article or NewsArticle, BreadcrumbList and CollectionPage
• SEO title, description and noindex for categories, tags and other archives
• og:locale:alternate for every language version of a page
• An option to load the featured image right away instead of lazily

Sitemaps

• An XML sitemap that replaces the one built into WordPress, readable in every browser without XSLT
• A preview in the settings with every sitemap file and its addresses as clickable links
• A Google News sitemap with articles from the last two days, at most 1000, and a list of categories to leave out
• Separate files for every language, for Bearius Multilingual, Polylang, WPML and TranslatePress, including the free version of TranslatePress
• Noindex content, empty archives and password protected entries are left out
• Fast on large sites: files are split by ID ranges and their map is cached until content changes
• The old WordPress sitemap address and the address used by other SEO plugins redirect to the new one

Robots.txt and AI crawlers

• Keeps the WordPress rules and adds the sitemap lines and your own rules
• A switch for each AI crawler of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Meta, Common Crawl and ByteDance
• Presets: allow all, block training but allow AI search, or block all. Nothing is blocked until you choose
• Shows the robots.txt crawlers really receive and warns when something else blocks them
• A rule that would block the whole site for everyone or for Google cannot be saved by accident

Audit

• Technical checks of settings, sitemaps, robots.txt and the IndexNow key file, also shown in Tools, Site Health
• The home page and the latest post are fetched as a visitor on desktop and on mobile: duplicated canonical tags, descriptions, Open Graph tags or structured data, headings, viewport, hreflang links and large image previews for Google Discover
• Recognises maintenance and coming soon pages, including the dangerous case of a maintenance page sent with status 200
• Performance hints read from the HTML: response time, page weight, render blocking files, a lazy loaded first image, images without dimensions and document size
• A content audit on live database queries: duplicate titles and descriptions, missing images, featured images too small for Discover, long titles, very short content and images without alt text
• An AI view: which AI crawlers may visit and what text they receive without JavaScript
• A score of our own and a printable report that can be saved as PDF
• A dashboard widget, notices for critical problems and optional e-mail alerts

Feeds, tags, comments and archives

• RSS: switch off comment feeds, archive feeds or all feeds, add the featured image, add a source line with links, delay new posts and leave out noindex entries or chosen categories
• Tags: hide them from visitors, with tag archives answering 410 Gone, or switch them off completely
• Comments: switch off pingbacks, close new comments or switch comments off everywhere
• Author and date archives: indexed, not indexed or switched off
• Nothing is deleted: switch back and everything returns

Also included

• IndexNow notifications for Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep, off until you switch them on
• Verification tags for Google Search Console, Bing, Seznam, Yandex, Naver, Baidu and Pinterest
• Breadcrumbs as a block, a shortcode and a template function
• An importer for Yoast SEO, Rank Math and All in One SEO data
• A getting started checklist on the Overview screen, with no wizard and no redirect after activation
• An optional “Powered by Bearius” footer link, off by default, nofollow, and shown only once even with several Bearius plugins

Works with other SEO plugins

When Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, All in One SEO, The SEO Framework, Slim SEO or Squirrly SEO is active, only the modules that would duplicate it are paused: meta tags, structured data, XML sitemap, robots.txt and verification. The Google News sitemap, IndexNow, the audit and the importer keep working, so you can add a free news sitemap to a site that runs another SEO plugin.

Languages

The plugin ships complete translations into Polish, German, Spanish and French. The plugin screens follow the language of the user’s profile, not the language of the site, so you can work in your own language on a site in any language. Each user can also pick a language for these screens on the Overview screen.

Data

All values are stored in native post meta, term meta and a few option rows. The plugin creates no database tables.

External services

This plugin connects to one external service, and only after you switch it on.

IndexNow is used to tell search engines that a page was published, updated or removed. When the IndexNow option on the Indexing screen is on, the plugin sends a request to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow each time a public entry is published, updated, unpublished or moved to the trash. The request contains the host name of your site, the IndexNow key generated by the plugin, the address of the key file and the addresses of the changed entries. Nothing else is sent. The service is operated by Microsoft and shared with the other participating search engines. Terms of use: https://www.indexnow.org/terms. Privacy statement: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy/privacystatement

The audit sends requests only to your own site, to read your pages, sitemaps, robots.txt and the IndexNow key file.