Pick and Mark Your Cornerstone Content in Yoast SEO with AI
Find the posts your site already treats as most important, mark the best of them as Yoast cornerstone content, and see where links to them are missing.
Prerequisites
A connected site running Yoast SEO 28.6 or newer (the free version works) on WordPress 6.9 or newer, with Yoast's text link counter on (it is by default). Yoast only offers these abilities on a production site (WordPress environment type production, the default); a staging or local copy set to another environment type shows none.
I use Yoast SEO on my WordPress site. Help me pick and mark my cornerstone content. Read the internal link counts Yoast keeps with a read-only database query, top 25 only: SELECT object_id, object_sub_type, breadcrumb_title, permalink, incoming_link_count, is_cornerstone FROM {prefix}yoast_indexable WHERE object_type='post' AND post_status='publish' ORDER BY incoming_link_count DESC LIMIT 25. If every count is empty or zero, stop and tell me to run Yoast SEO, Tools, SEO data optimization first. Tell me which posts are already marked as cornerstone. Read the content of the top candidates with the REST API and propose 3 to 8 cornerstones: complete, evergreen posts or pages that explain a core topic of my site, not news, announcements, or thin posts. Show me a table with post, incoming links, word count, and why it qualifies, and wait for my approval. Mark only the posts I approve with the yoast-seo/update-post-seo-data ability, using the post ID and is_cornerstone set to true, and send no other fields. Read each one back with get-post-seo-data. Then, for each new cornerstone, search my published posts for its topic, check which of them already link to it with SELECT post_id FROM {prefix}yoast_seo_links WHERE target_post_id=[cornerstone post ID] AND type='internal', and list up to five related posts that do not link to it yet, with the sentence where a link would fit. Do not edit any post content.
Skip pasting the full prompt. Drop this into your AI on a site that already has WPVibe:
Run the “Pick and Mark Your Cornerstone Content in Yoast SEO with AI” recipe from the WPVibe cookbook on my connected site.
Yoast asks you to mark your cornerstone content, the handful of posts that best explain what your site is about, and most sites never do. The checkbox is the easy part. Picking which posts deserve it, and making sure the rest of the site actually links to them, is the part that gets put off.
The AI reads the internal link counts Yoast already keeps for every post, finds the posts your own site points to most, and reads the top candidates to judge which are complete enough to be cornerstones. It proposes a short list with a reason for each and marks the ones you approve through Yoast’s own ability. Then it lists related posts that do not link to each cornerstone yet, with the sentence where a link would fit. It does not edit any post content.
Paste the prompt as it is. Yoast holds cornerstone posts to a stricter content analysis, and the posts list gets a filter for them. The link counts come from Yoast’s text link counter, which records a post’s links when it is saved with Yoast active, so on a site where Yoast was installed recently, run the SEO data optimization under Yoast SEO, Tools first or the counts will be empty. Unmarking a cornerstone is the same setting turned off.
Outcome
Your best posts are marked as Yoast cornerstone content, and you have a list of the related posts that should link to them.