Changelog

New

• Schedule refresh, in the Bulk actions of Content health, plans a one-off refresh of the articles you picked, on the date and time you choose.
• A scheduled article shows "Scheduled for" its date on Content health, with a Cancel link.
• A scheduled refresh that WordPress runs more than a day late starts nothing, and the article says why.
• Exclude joins Refresh selected in the Bulk actions of Content health, so a whole selection leaves the list in one go.
• Show all puts the whole list on a single page, with your tranche and your search kept.

Improved

• Excluding a scheduled article, or refreshing it from anywhere else, cancels its schedule.
• The title of an article opens its public page in a new tab, on Content health and on Excluded.

Improved

• A consolidation from Unstale Pro waits in the review queue even when automatic publishing is on.
• The automatic publishing setting and the block under the editor say that consolidations still wait for your review.

Fixed

• With automatic publishing on, the block under the editor and the queued notices no longer promise that the refresh waits for your review.
• The plugin description no longer claims that every figure is checked. The fact-check covers the most important claims, and a second pass checks the figures the rewrite adds.

Fixed

• A consolidation saved while a scan or a restore updates the same list at that moment is no longer lost.
• Restoring or publishing a SeedProd page built with Pro blocks updates the cannibalization scan right away, instead of up to 12 hours later.
• A scan that finishes after an article changed no longer serves results computed before the change.

Improved

• The card of a consolidated group names the article it was consolidated into, with the date, and keeps that article as the keeper.
• Restoring the previous version of a consolidated keeper forgets that consolidation, so the group is checked afresh.

Fixed

• A group you consolidated no longer vanishes from the scan once the keeper absorbs the other articles, as long as one of them is still published.

• Remembering new consolidations needs Unstale Pro 1.9.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

Improved

• With the free Unstale 1.21.0, the Consolidate confirmation and the Automation screen say that a consolidation waits for your review even when automatic publishing is on.

• With an older free plugin, automatic publishing still publishes a consolidation without a review, and the confirmation says so.

Fixed

• With automatic publishing on, the bulk refresh notices and the Consolidate confirmation no longer send you to a review that will not happen.

Added

• The card of a consolidated group offers to propose retiring its absorbed articles again, after you kept them published or the proposal was lost.

Improved

• Consolidate is hidden on a group whose articles all belong to a consolidation that is already published.
• A Consolidate form left open while those articles were consolidated is refused when submitted, so the same articles are never consolidated twice.

• Consolidations queued from now on are remembered by the free Unstale 1.20.0. With an older free plugin, Consolidate works as before.

Improved

• Each AI verdict is kept with its date and survives a page reload, until the group itself changes.
• A group the AI found free of cannibalization shows no keeper, and a failed re-check keeps the previous verdict.

Fixed

• When Confirm with AI keeps only part of a group, the card greys out the articles it left out, marks the keeper the AI chose and says how many it confirmed.

• Consolidating only the confirmed articles needs Unstale Pro 1.8.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

Fixed

• After Confirm with AI splits a group, Consolidate offers only the articles the AI confirmed as keepers, and absorbs and proposes to retire only those.
• A group the AI found free of cannibalization no longer offers Consolidate.

• A consolidation form opened before the verdict follows it when submitted: a keeper the AI left out is refused.
• Bounding Consolidate to the AI verdict needs the free Unstale 1.19.0. With an older free plugin, Consolidate works as before.

New

• When an article is retired into another one, its URL sends visitors to the article that absorbed it, with a permanent redirect served by the plugin itself. It works the same on Apache, nginx, IIS and LiteSpeed, and nothing is ever written to your .htaccess file.
• A Redirects screen lists those redirects and undoes them, either by removing the redirect alone or by publishing the article again. It appears once the site has at least one.

• A redirect stops firing on its own the moment its article is published again, without you touching anything.
• Retiring an article is done by Unstale Pro 1.7.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

New

• When a consolidation publishes, Unstale offers to retire the articles it absorbed. Each becomes a draft, and its URL sends visitors to the article that absorbed it with a permanent redirect.

• The redirect is served by the plugin, so it works the same on Apache, nginx, IIS and LiteSpeed, and nothing is ever written to your .htaccess file.
• Nothing happens unless you click: leaving the offer alone keeps every article published, and nothing is ever deleted.
• An article whose URL cannot be redirected is left published rather than turned into a dead link.
• Undo any of it from Unstale > Redirects, by removing the redirect alone or by publishing the article again.
• Retiring needs the free Unstale in version 1.18.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second; wordpress.org can take an hour longer to propose it.

Fixed

• On a site whose year comes from a date shortcode plugin (Dynamic Month & Year, Runthings, Current Year Shortcode, Shortcode for Current Date, WP Date and Time Shortcode), a refresh could end on "A shortcode placeholder was lost during the rewrite" and publish nothing, after every step had run. The year now travels as the refresh marker instead of a shielded shortcode, and comes back as your plugin's shortcode.

New

• A search box on Content health filters the list by title and slug, case and accents ignored, without reloading the page. The age threshold, the tranches, your exclusions and the noindex rule keep their meaning.

Improved

• The meta title and description carry your SEO plugin's current-year variable (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress) instead of a fixed year, at Balanced and above.

Fixed

• On an Elementor page, a style edit made in the builder while a refresh waited for review was undone on approval. Publication now refuses, without writing anything, if the layout changed since the refresh started.
• A refresh that leaves an Elementor, Divi or SeedProd layout unchanged keeps its point of return, which 1.16.0 dropped.

New

• Restore the previous version now works on pages built with Elementor, Divi and SeedProd. Each builder records what the refresh is about to overwrite, layout included, and puts it back on click.

Fixed

• On an Elementor page, visitors could see the old text for up to a day after publication. Elementor's element cache is now cleared on every write.
• The restore link and its notices say what will actually be put back on a builder page, and a restore completed halfway is logged and can be tried again.

New

• Year references now follow the calendar. "In 2025" or "updated for 2025" reads the current year after a refresh, in the text at every level, in the title and metas at Balanced and above. A year that dates an event stays as it is.
• With a current-year shortcode plugin active, the refresh writes its shortcode instead of a fixed year, only where it has been measured to render. Five plugins are recognised, and the unstale_year_token filter sets your own token per surface.
• The post title is refreshed at Balanced and above, by its year only. The slug never moves, and a title you edited during the refresh is never overwritten.

• Unstale Pro 1.6.0 needs this version. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

New

• Affiliate product boxes on Strong and Maximal. With AffiMax or AAWP active, Pro inserts one box per product the article compares or recommends, as your affiliate plugin's own shortcode, at the end of the section that presents it. Four boxes per article at most, nothing without an affiliate plugin. Filters: unstale_affiliate_plugin, unstale_affiliate_shortcode, unstale_affiliate_max_boxes.
• A second refresh replaces the boxes Pro inserted the first time instead of adding to them. A shortcode you typed by hand is never removed.
• The current-year behaviour of Unstale 1.15.0 applies on Strong and Maximal too, in the title, meta title and meta description.

• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.15.0 or newer, up from 1.9.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second; wordpress.org can take an hour longer to propose it.

Fixed

• A step that failed twice in the same paid way no longer buys a third identical attempt. Failures that cost nothing keep their three tries, and a manual retry always starts with the full budget.

Fixed

• A long post could fail its refresh over and over with "The answer from the model was cut off at the output limit". Batches are now sized on what is actually sent, not on a word count that ignored block markup.
• The room allowed for a rewritten batch was shared with the model's thinking. It is now twice as large, at no extra cost.
• Updating Unstale halfway through a long rewrite could publish a post with one passage duplicated and another missing. The rewrite now starts over when the split changed.

Fixed

• When the AI found no cannibalization in a group, Content cannibalization said "AI could not confirm this group", which reads as a breakdown. A verdict now reads as a verdict.
• Roughly one verdict in seven was paid for and never delivered, cut short at 1024 output tokens. The room allowed is now four times larger, and the price shown before you click does not change.

Fixed

• Confirm with AI answered "This cannibalization group no longer exists" for every group as soon as any post on the site had been saved since the scan. The groups are now recomputed and matched by their posts.
• The Excluded tab listed every item of a content type Unstale never refreshes, one line each. Such types now appear once, with a count, and the count above the list covers only what you can reintegrate.

Fixed

• The Consolidate into keeper button answered "This cannibalization group no longer exists" for a group still on screen whenever any post had been saved since the scan. With Unstale 1.14.1 or newer the groups are recomputed and matched by their posts.

Fixed

• Confirm with AI answered "AI could not confirm this group" for every group. A 200-token cap cut the verdict off before it began; it is now 1024, and a cut-off answer shows as a failure with its cause.
• The AI check used the catalog's recommended model instead of the one you chose in the settings.
• The cannibalization scan no longer groups content Content health already excludes, noindex pages and posts you excluded by hand. The Pro weekly sweep applies the same rule.
• Titles in the cannibalization cards could show raw HTML entities.
• A server reply that was not JSON, a maintenance page for instance, is reported as a failed request instead of an empty verdict.

New

• A notice tells you when your default refresh level is one your plan no longer allows, and what repairs it. Your setting is never rewritten behind your back.

Fixed

• The settings screen shows the refresh level you actually saved, even a locked one, and saving a locked level overwrites nothing.
• A model that leaves the catalog stops the job by name instead of quietly calling another provider.
• The bulk refresh screen stops on a level your plan has locked, instead of blaming your AI provider.
• An Elementor floating button is no longer treated as refreshable content nor picked as an internal-link target. Any content type its developer keeps out of navigation menus is left alone; WooCommerce products stay.

Fixed

• The weekly cannibalization sweep grouped content the free plugin already excludes, noindex pages and manual exclusions. It now uses the free plugin's scanner, so the sweep and Content health agree. Needs Unstale 1.14.0 or newer for the exclusions to apply.

New

• When the automation queues nothing on a run, a notice says why and links to your settings. A model that has left the catalog, for instance, used to refuse every candidate every night with a counter for its only trace. The notice clears on the first run that queues something.

Fixed

• The run log records what stopped each candidate, grouped by cause.

New

• Content your SEO plugin marks noindex is left out of Content health. Read from Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, SEOPress and Rank Math, each measured on a real site; any doubt keeps the page in the list.
• An Excluded tab on Content health lists what Unstale never refreshes and who decided it: a content type with no search surface, a manual exclusion, or a noindex set in your SEO plugin, which is named.

Fixed

• Refusing to refresh an excluded post now points to the posts list, where the Reintegrate link actually is.

New

• An Exclude link, next to Refresh, in the posts list and on Content health. An excluded post leaves every list Unstale works from, and a refresh started on it is refused. The link then reads Reintegrate.

Fixed

• Content types with no search surface, Popup Maker popups or Elementor templates for instance, no longer appear as posts to refresh or as internal-link targets. WooCommerce products stay.
• A bulk refresh that refuses a post now says why.

New

• A refresh now fact-checks the figures it added itself, at every level, and lists on the review screen the added figures that are outdated or unconfirmed, with a source link. No model is called when nothing was added.

Fixed

• The count of checked facts reads "checked in the original article", with the added figures on their own line below.
• The Journal no longer reports 0 searches for refreshes that did search the web. No provider plugin passes that count on yet, the Journal says so, and the logged cost is documented as a floor.

Fixed

• When the catalog replaces a model with a newer one from the same family, your site follows the upgrade, Gemini 3.7 Flash to Gemini 3.8 Flash for instance. A replacement that would change provider is refused.

New

• The Unstale block under the editor says, before you start, whether the refresh will move the publish date.

Fixed

• A refresh could change how your article speaks to its reader, informal to formal for instance. Unstale now measures the voice before rewriting and holds every step to it, the meta description included.
• The model catalog records when a model is renamed, so a site that chose Gemini 3.7 Flash keeps its choice and its rate the day it becomes Gemini 3.8 Flash.

Fixed

• On Strong and Maximal, a refresh could change how your article speaks to its reader, informal to formal for instance. Pro now holds its four writing steps, meta description included, to the voice the free plugin measures on your original.

• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.9.0 or newer, up from 1.8.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

Fixed

• On a site made of short pages, Content health could miss two pages that said the same thing word for word. A pair is now measured against the shorter of the two posts. Long posts score exactly as before.

Fixed

• On a site written in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao, Khmer or Burmese, Content health found very few competing posts. The comparison now switches on the writing system itself, at any length. Korean and every spaced language are unchanged.

Fixed

• On Content health, a group of more than 25 posts sharing a vocabulary is a template, never sent to the AI pass. It said "AI could not confirm this group"; it now says the pages share a layout and that no model was called.

New

• Content health now finds published posts that compete over the same topic, grouped with the post Unstale would keep and why. It runs on your own site, with no AI provider and at no cost. An optional AI pass, priced before you start, tells shared vocabulary from a shared query.

• If you use Unstale Pro, groups found by its weekly sweep now show on this screen too. Needs Unstale Pro 1.3.0 or newer.

Fixed

• A weekly sweep that stopped before the end of your site still published its partial results as if they were complete. The sweep now reports it, and Content health says the list is incomplete.
• The notice counting posts with too little distinctive text now says they cannot be matched at all, even against an identical copy. They are still compared, as before.

New

• Pro sweeps your whole site for posts that compete over the same topic, once a week, in batches in the background, on your own server and at no cost.
• A group the sweep has never reported before is announced on the Unstale screens, with a link. Never the same finding twice.
• A Consolidate button on each group queues a refresh on the post Unstale would keep, fed with what the other posts cover. Nothing is deleted or redirected, and the result lands in your review queue.

• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.8.0 or newer, up from 1.6.0. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

New

• Pro carries its own icon on the WordPress updates screen, the free plugin's mark with the dot replaced by a star.

Fixed

• That screen said "Compatibility with WordPress 7.1: Not tested" under Pro. The tested version now reaches WordPress, along with the WordPress and PHP versions Pro requires.

• Both show from your NEXT update, since WordPress builds the notice with the version you already have.
• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.6.0 or newer, unchanged from 1.1.0.

New

• A Get started screen, opened on first activation, lists the five posts that have gone longest without an update and queues all five in one click, through the usual estimate screen. It stays in the Unstale menu.

New

• The quiz added by Strong and Maximal is now something a reader plays: each answer stays folded until asked for, and Pro says whether the choice was right, keeps a score and opens the explanation.

• The fold is plain HTML, so the quiz keeps working with Pro switched off, expired or deleted. Only the scoring goes with the add-on.
• Articles refreshed before this version keep the quiz they were published with; the new one arrives with their next Strong or Maximal refresh.
• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.6.0 or newer, unchanged from 1.0.4.

New

• A Restore button in the Unstale block puts a post back as it was before its refresh: text, publish date and SEO metas, field by field, and only what the refresh changed.
• A notice across the admin when refreshes are waiting for your review.
• The Unstale column in the posts list colours the age of the last refresh, on the same thresholds as Content health.
• An Export CSV button on the Journal, carrying the current filter.
• The refresh level slider in Settings shows what each level costs per 1,000 words, Pro levels included.

New

• With Unstale Pro 1.0.3 or newer, the Unstale block under the editor says what the automation decides for the open post, and warns when a rule excludes it.

Fixed

• Twelve strings had never reached the translation catalogue, among them everything the editor block says about automation rules and the support section of the Licence screen.

• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.6.0 or newer, up from 1.1.2, in line with the free plugin actually supported. Update the free plugin first and Pro second.

New

• The Unstale block under the post editor says what your automation decides for the open post: the governing category rule, its level, and when the next scheduled pass runs.
• That block warns when a rule EXCLUDES the post from the automation, names the category and links to the rules screen.

• Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.5.1 or newer; on an older one the block looks exactly as it did.

New

• An Unstale block under the post editor, in both editors. Pick a level, start the refresh and follow it step by step without leaving the page.
• Once a refresh is ready, that block lists everything it did: length change, corrected facts and their sources, metas, structured data, internal links and inserted blocks.
• On the free plugin, picking Strong or Maximal shows what that level would add to the open post, without inventing numbers.

Fixed

• On Content health, posts never refreshed carried an empty line in their Unstale cell, stretching every row of a fresh install.

New

• With Unstale Pro, its licence key field now also appears in Unstale > Settings.

Fixed

• The bundled model catalogue still expected Claude Sonnet 5 to get more expensive on 1 September. Anthropic made its $2 / $10 per million tokens permanent on 10 August.

Improved

• The cost question in this readme gives the real range across the catalogue.

Fixed

• On a site using All in One SEO, a refresh wrote its title and description where nothing read them. Unstale now writes through AIOSEO's own interface.
• The cost announced on Google models was about fifteen times too high: search results are not billed as input tokens there, and the free monthly search allowance is now counted. On a 500-word article at Balanced, 24 cents became 4.
• Elementor, Divi and SeedProd pages no longer raise a page builder warning. It is kept for builders without an adapter, and says what would really happen.
• A builder section holding a script or style block could carry that code into the rewritten text.

New

• Your licence key can be entered from Unstale > Settings, next to the refresh levels it unlocks, as well as from the Licence menu. Needs the free Unstale plugin in version 1.4.1 or newer.

Fixed

• On PHP 8.1 the plugin did not work at all, one file using syntax that only exists from PHP 8.2. Nothing changes on PHP 8.2 or later.

Improved

• When a refresh updates a SeedProd page inside the builder but not the live page, the journal says so and names the one step left: open the page in SeedProd and save.

New

• Pages built with SeedProd can now be refreshed, layout, styling and images untouched. Elementor and Divi were already supported.

• On SeedProd pages using SeedProd Pro blocks, the new text lands in the builder but the live page keeps its text until you reopen it in SeedProd and save.

New

• Pages built with Elementor or Divi can now be refreshed. Only the text goes through the refresh; layout, styling and settings stay as they were. An unsupported builder is flagged before anything runs.
• Shortcodes are lifted out before the rewrite and put back afterwards, exactly as they were.
• SEOPress is detected like Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO.

Improved

• An unreadable model answer is quoted at both ends in the journal, not just its first 300 characters.
• A builder field holding a structure rather than plain text is left alone instead of being replaced by the word "Array".
• The word count used to size a refresh no longer counts shortcode markup.

Fixed

• A long article could be published with a hole in the middle when the model cut a batch short. A cut-off answer is now refused and retried.
• A SeedProd page built from a theme template was not recognised as a builder page, and its refresh was lost.
• An Elementor or Divi page containing anything shortcode-shaped failed at the publishing step every time.
• The guard against overwriting an edit made while a job waited in the review queue was switched off on Elementor and Divi pages.
• Backslashes in your content were dropped on publication.

New

• After two weeks of real use and at least three published refreshes, Unstale asks for a review on wordpress.org, on its own screens only. "Do not ask again" means exactly that.

Fixed

• Refreshing a post a second time no longer stacks a second set of key-takeaway boxes on the first.
• The key-takeaway boxes are valid blocks wherever they come from, so an add-on can add its own without the editor flagging the content.

New

• The Licence screen shows where to reach priority email support. Without an active licence it points to the free plugin's public forum.

• First release. Strong and Maximal levels, scheduled automation, per-category rules, bulk refresh, licence activation and in-place updates.
• Requires the free Unstale plugin in version 1.1.2 or newer.

Added

• Two filters (`unstale_prompt`, `unstale_rewrite_prompt`) so an add-on can serve its own system prompts.

New

• A Content health screen lists the published content you have not touched in a while, oldest first, in three age ranges. It reads only your database and works with no AI provider connected.
• Select several items there and send them in one batch, capped at 50, with the total cost shown before anything starts and every left-out item named with its reason.
• A setting decides how long content has to sit untouched before it counts as stale, 180 days by default.

Improved

• Up to 15 internal links per refresh, instead of 10.

Improved

• The review queue compares the text your readers see, not the block markup. On a real refresh the comparison went from 100 rows to 31.
• At Balanced, a dense paragraph hiding a series of steps or figures is restructured into a list or a table.
• The comparison heading names the level that produced it.

Fixed

• The boxes added by the enrich step were plain HTML between two blocks, which the editor reported as invalid content. They are now regular blocks.

Fixed

• On a long article, the metas and structured data step could hit the output limit mid-answer and retry under the same limit. The limit is now high enough, and a cut-off answer says so in the journal.

Fixed

• A refresh could die on an article with nothing to fact-check, the model's reply being written in a way the plugin could not read. Those answers are now understood.

Fixed

• A model answering with reasoning only killed the refresh outright. It is now treated like any other step failure: logged, counted in the cost, and retried.

Fixed

• The cost shown could be lower than what your provider billed, a failed step dropping the tokens it had spent. Every call that reaches the provider is now counted on its own line.
• The journal quotes what the model actually sent back when its answer could not be read.

Fixed

• A refresh that died mid-step always reported the same generic reason. The journal now records what the worker actually reported.

Fixed

• A refresh could fail for good during a short provider outage, all three attempts falling inside 90 seconds. Retries are now spaced 2 and 10 minutes apart.

First public release of the free plugin on the wordpress.org plugin directory.

Added

• Bring-your-own-key on the WordPress AI Client: you connect Anthropic, OpenAI or Google in Settings > Connectors, WordPress holds the key, and no content and no key ever reaches an Unstale server.
• Four refresh levels behind a single slider. Minimal and Balanced are free; Strong and Maximal unlock with Unstale Pro.
• Refresh pipeline: analysis, live web research, fact-check of figures, prices and dates, rewrite, enrichment (metas, JSON-LD, key-takeaway callouts), internal linking and cleanup.
• Internal linking with up to 10 relevant links per refresh, varied anchors, one link per target page, and no forced links when nothing relevant exists.
• Review queue with a side-by-side diff and approve, reject, cancel, retry and unstick actions. Full-auto publishing is available but off by default.
• SEO-safe republication: the post URL, slug and native revision history are preserved, with an optional date bump, position control, randomised timing and allowed days and windows.
• Dated-permalink safety: the date bump is skipped automatically on core date-based structures, and the %unstale_year%, %unstale_monthnum% and %unstale_day% tags freeze the original date in the URL. Deactivation restores the core tags.
• Cost estimate shown before every run, per article and per batch, plus a journal recording every step, web search, token count and real cost.
• Unstale column in the post list with status, last refresh and a one-click refresh action.
• REST API (unstale/v1) and WP-CLI (wp unstale refresh) for automation.
• Remote model catalogue fetched once a day and cached for 48 hours, with a bundled fallback, so new models and new provider rates appear without a plugin update.
• Gutenberg and Classic editor support on posts, pages and public custom post types, with a targeted cache purge (URL, home and feeds) instead of a full flush.
• Complete internationalisation from day one: text domain unstale, POT file shipped, en_US default.