Growth Combinator

Growth Combinator writes and publishes SEO articles for your business through Growth Studio. Studio publishes to your site with WordPress’s own REST API and an application password that you approve. This plugin is the site’s side of that connection.

What it does

• Keeps your sitemap fresh. Rank Math caches its XML sitemap and only refreshes the cache when a post is saved in wp-admin. Posts that arrive through the REST API, which is how Studio publishes, stay out of the sitemap until someone saves something by hand. With this plugin, Rank Math refreshes its sitemap the moment Studio publishes, updates or removes a post, using Rank Math’s own code. Yoast SEO already does this by itself, so nothing changes there.
• Puts Studio’s pages at the addresses you choose. Studio can give a post or page its own address, for example /blogs/goa/best-beaches/ or /goa/best-beaches/, without changing your site’s permalink settings or any other post. The page answers there; WordPress’s own address for it, and every address it had before, send readers to it with a permanent (301) redirect that keeps any query string. Your canonical tags, sitemap, breadcrumbs and feeds use the new address automatically (Rank Math and Yoast SEO tested). Old addresses are kept forever, so a redirect never stops working. Studio sets addresses through /wp-json/growth-combinator/v1/paths, which requires permission to edit that post, and refuses any address that already belongs to a page, post, category or Rank Math redirection.
• Breadcrumbs that follow the address. On a page with a Studio address, your Rank Math or Yoast SEO breadcrumbs, and the breadcrumb data search engines read, show the pages that live along that address: Home › Blogs › Goa › Best beaches. Each step is the page at that part of the address, whether Studio made it or you did. Home and the page’s own step stay exactly as your SEO plugin makes them, and every other page on your site keeps its breadcrumbs unchanged.
• Tells Studio how your site is set up. It adds one read-only REST route, /wp-json/growth-combinator/v1/status, which reports the plugin’s version, your permalink pattern and your SEO plugin, so Studio puts every article at the right address. Only a signed-in user who can edit posts can read it. The list of active plugins is only included for users who can manage plugins.
• Shows you what it does. The Growth Combinator page in wp-admin shows whether Studio is connected, when it last published, and what each part of the plugin is doing on your site.

What it does not do

• It does not contact Growth Combinator or any other outside service. Studio calls your site; the plugin never calls out.
• It adds one database table, {prefix}gc_paths, holding the addresses Studio gave your pages and their old addresses. Nothing else is stored. Deleting the plugin keeps the table, so reinstalling restores every address and redirect.
• It changes nothing on pages Studio did not give an address to.

To disconnect Studio, revoke the “Growth Studio” application password under Users → Profile. If you deactivate the plugin, pages with a Studio address answer at WordPress’s own addresses again; the addresses come back when you reactivate it.