If you’ve seen the news about AI coming to WordPress 7.0 and aren’t sure what it means for your website, this post breaks it down plainly.
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 your preferred AI provider; OpenAI, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude.
What the AI Client Is (and Isn’t)
Once connected, nothing visibly changes and no new features appear on your site. The AI Client is a shared foundation that plugins can build on, not something you interact with directly.
It is also not a chat interface. You can’t type instructions to your site and have it make changes. That kind of functionality; where an AI agent can read and edit your WordPress site; requires a different type 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 built in and work independently. That may change as more plugin developers adopt the new standard over time, but for now the two systems largely run in parallel.
What It Powers Right Now
The main plugin currently using the WordPress AI Client is the official AI Experiments plugin, built and maintained by the WordPress team. It’s free, and once you have a provider connected in Settings > Connectors, it adds useful AI features to your editor and admin backend:
- Title Generation. AI-suggested post titles while you’re editing
- Excerpt Generation. Auto-written post summaries
- Content Summarisation. Generates an AI summary block for longer articles
- Image Generation. Create images from within the editor or media library
- Alt Text Generation. Automatic alt text for images
- Review Notes. Content suggestions for readability, grammar, accessibility, and SEO
These are opt-in, practical time-savers for anyone publishing content regularly. Nothing here will work until you’ve set up at least one provider in Settings > Connectors first.
The Broader AI Plugin Landscape
Beyond what’s built into WordPress, there’s a wide range of plugins that connect to AI services to handle specific tasks; WooCommerce product descriptions, customer support chatbots, semantic search, SEO content, image generation, and more. These work independently of the WordPress AI Client and aren’t going anywhere soon. You can browse everything available in our AI Tool Directory.
If you want an AI assistant embedded directly in your WordPress backend for site management tasks, there are dedicated plugins for that too; you’ll find those in our AI WordPress Coding and AI Chatbot categories.
That said, the WordPress team is clearly planning to expand the AI Experiments plugin over time. Features that prove useful are candidates for inclusion in future WordPress core releases. It’s reasonable to expect that some of the simpler AI plugins; basic title generators, alt text tools, excerpt writers; may eventually become redundant as WordPress matures its own offering. Plugins doing more specialised work are less likely to be affected.
Where to Start
If you’re on WordPress 7.0+, the lowest-risk way to explore this is to add a provider in Settings > Connectors and install the free AI Experiments plugin. It gives you a practical feel for where WordPress AI is heading without any significant commitment.
If you want help figuring out which AI tools or features are actually worth implementing for your business, get in touch about our AI website services →.
