Prime SEO reads the titles, descriptions, keyphrases and robots settings AIOSEO keeps in its own table (15 fields per post, plus redirects) and copies them in one click, while AIOSEO stays installed until you have compared the two. The setup wizard installs nothing but Prime SEO itself, and the plugin weighs 2 MB against AIOSEO’s 25.
Three quotes from one- and two-star reviews on WordPress.org, out of the 300 most recent ones we read on September 22, 2026. Links go to the original reviews.
“Going through the simple wizard start up, without asking my permission, this free plugin installed 2 more!”
Review on WordPress.org, May 25, 2026
“It repeatedly offers to buy from options which we do not need and it slows down the speed of WordPress a lot.”
Review on WordPress.org, June 17, 2025
“Unless you want a slower site from bloatware and the headache of cleaning up an unneeded mess, I suggest finding an alternative SEO management plugin.”
Review on WordPress.org, February 12, 2024
Wizard.php, installPlugins())Addons.php: image SEO, IndexNow, video and news sitemaps, local business, link assistant, EEATFile counts and sizes: the plugin folders from WordPress.org, measured on September 22, 2026 (AIOSEO 5.0.1.1). Wizard installers: app/Common/Api/Wizard.php. The GPTBot finding: our file-by-file read of five free SEO plugins.
The Migration Tool reads AIOSEO’s own data. Nothing in AIOSEO is deleted, so you can compare both plugins before switching off the old one.
| AIOSEO data | Fields | Imported |
|---|---|---|
| SEO title, meta description, keyphrases (focus and additional) | 3 | ✓ Yes |
| Canonical URL and robots: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex | 6 | ✓ Yes |
| Open Graph title, description, image (uploaded or custom URL); Twitter title | 5 | ✓ Yes |
| Pillar content flag | 1 | ✓ Yes |
Redirects from the aioseo_redirects table (Redirection Manager add-on) |
table | ✓ Yes |
| SEO analysis scores, Link Assistant data, Local Business fields | — | ✕ Not imported |
Field list from class-prime-seo-migration.php in Prime SEO 1.2.0: 15 columns of the aioseo_posts table (AIOSEO keeps post data there, not in post meta) and the aioseo_redirects table.
A switch costs an afternoon. These are the reasons not to make it.
AIOSEO free grades each post with its TruSEO checks and runs a site-wide SEO audit. Prime SEO has one 0-to-100 score with 14 checks per post and no site audit.
AIOSEO reports 2 million active installs in the directory. Prime SEO is a 2026 plugin with a fraction of that, one developer and no premium support tier.
Sitemaps, schema, breadcrumbs and a robots.txt editor are free in both. If those are all you use and the wizard never bothered you, switching gains you the AI crawler controls and 23 MB of disk, not much else.
yoursite.com/sitemap.xml./sitemap.xml). Keep the AIOSEO plugin folder for a week in case you want to compare, then delete it.Rankings depend on the tags a crawler reads in the head of the page (title, description, canonical, robots directives), and every one of them is imported unchanged, so a crawler visiting the day after the switch finds the same head section it indexed the week before.
Not from the switch itself. The tags Google reads (title, description, canonical, robots) are imported as they were. What can change rankings is deactivating AIOSEO without importing first, which leaves posts with no meta description for a while. Import, verify, then deactivate.
No. The Migration Tool reads AIOSEO’s own data and copies it. It deletes nothing. If you reactivate AIOSEO, everything is where it was.
No. The plugin has no code that downloads or activates another plugin. The only thing the setup wizard configures is Prime SEO itself.
The free version has two admin notices: a review request after seven days of use and a conflict warning when another SEO plugin is active, shown only on Prime SEO’s own pages. Pro features appear as buttons where they apply, such as “Generate with AI” in the post editor. There are no banners, no popups and nothing installs itself.
For the import, yes. For a live site, no: two SEO plugins each output their own meta tags and sitemaps, and search engines get duplicates. Deactivate AIOSEO once the import is verified.
The version on WordPress.org includes titles and descriptions, sitemaps, schema, redirects, 404 monitor, IndexNow, breadcrumbs, image SEO, llms.txt and the AI Bots Manager. Pro ($59 a year) adds AI-written titles and descriptions, a bulk generator, an AI content score and a video sitemap.
Install the free version, run the import, look at three posts. AIOSEO stays active until you switch it off.
Install Free on WordPress.org Read the Migration Tool documentation →