Adding your AI key

Why bring your own key

Most AI SEO tools buy tokens in bulk and resell them to you with a markup, usually as credits you can run out of. This one doesn’t sit in that path at all. Your key, your Anthropic account, their published rate.

The practical effect: no credit maths, no per-fix charges from us, and the price never moves without you knowing. The plugin licence pays for the software; the AI usage is between you and Anthropic.

Getting a key

1. Open the Anthropic Console and sign in or create an account.
2. Add a little credit — five dollars is plenty to start and covers roughly five hundred fixes.
3. Go to API Keys and create a new key. Copy it straight away; Anthropic shows it once.

The plugin gives you this same checklist with direct links, so you don’t have to hunt around the console on your own.

Adding it to the plugin

Go to Settings → AI, paste the key into the field and click Connect. The plugin makes a test call immediately and tells you whether it worked. If the test passes, the key is encrypted and stored, and AI-written fixes light up across the Issues list.

You can remove the key at any time from the same screen. Removing it doesn’t undo anything already applied — those changes live in your own content.

What it actually costs

Roughly a cent per fix as a working guide. The exact figure depends on how long the page is and which Claude model you pick, so the plugin shows an estimate before you spend anything, and the Costs screen tracks every request.

A realistic example: a site where you fix 120 pages with three fixes each, rescanned quarterly, comes to somewhere around five or six dollars for the year.

How your key is stored

• Encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, using a key derived from your own WordPress salts.
• Never returned to the browser. The settings endpoint reports only whether a key exists, not what it is. Once saved, it can’t be read back out through the API.
• Never sent to us. AI requests go from your server straight to api.anthropic.com. We’re not a proxy and your post content doesn’t pass through our infrastructure.

If it won’t connect

Two causes account for nearly every failure:

• No credit on the account. A key with a zero balance authenticates but can’t complete a request. Add credit and try again.
• A trailing space. Copy-paste often picks one up. Delete the field contents and paste again carefully.

If the test call itself returns an error, send us that exact message on the Support page — it usually names the problem outright.

Next: Running your first scan →