If you’ve seen the news about AI coming to WordPress 7.0 and aren’t sure what it means for your website, the short answer is: not much yet, but it lays the groundwork for what comes next.
What’s New in WordPress 7.0
WordPress 7.0 includes a built-in AI connection system called the AI Client. You’ll find it under Settings > Connectors in your dashboard, where you can add an API key from OpenAI, Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude.
What the AI Client Is (and Isn’t)
Once you’ve connected a provider, nothing visibly changes and no new features appear on your site. The AI Client is a shared foundation for plugins to build on. You won’t interact with it directly.
It also isn’t a chat interface. You can’t type instructions to your site and have it make changes. For that, where an AI agent reads and edits your WordPress site, you need a different kind of tool called an MCP (Model Context Protocol). We cover those in the AI WordPress MCP category of our AI Tool Directory.
Most existing AI plugins won’t use the AI Client either. They have their own API key settings and work independently. That may change as more plugin developers adopt the new standard, but for now the two systems mostly run side by side.
What It Powers Right Now
The main plugin using the AI Client at the moment is the official AI Experiments plugin, built and maintained by the WordPress team. It’s free, and it adds these features to the editor and admin:
- Title generation: suggests post titles while you’re editing
- Excerpt generation: writes post summaries for you
- Content summarisation: adds an AI summary block to longer articles
- Image generation: creates images from within the editor or media library
- Alt text generation: fills in alt text for images automatically
- Review notes: suggests changes for readability, grammar, accessibility and SEO
They’re all opt-in, and they save real time if you publish regularly. None of them work until you’ve added at least one provider in Settings > Connectors.
Other AI Plugins
Outside of WordPress core, plenty of plugins connect to AI services for specific jobs: WooCommerce product descriptions, support chatbots, semantic search, SEO content, image generation and more. They work independently of the AI Client and aren’t going anywhere soon. You can browse them in our AI Tool Directory.
If you want an AI assistant in your WordPress backend for site management, there are plugins for that too. You’ll find them in our AI WordPress Coding and AI Chatbot categories.
The WordPress team is clearly planning to grow the AI Experiments plugin, and features that prove useful are candidates for future core releases. If that happens, some of the simpler AI plugins (title generators, alt text tools, excerpt writers) may become redundant. Plugins doing more specialised work are less likely to be affected.
Where to Start
If you’re on WordPress 7.0 or later, the lowest-risk way to try this is to add a provider in Settings > Connectors and install the free AI Experiments plugin. You’ll get a feel for where WordPress AI is heading without committing to much.
If you’d like help working out which AI tools are worth setting up for your business, get in touch about our AI website services →.
