At Visceral, we’ve been building WordPress websites for nearly two decades. So when a new version drops, we preview it with a mixture of excitement and healthy skepticism. WordPress 7 is here, and yes, it includes AI features.
Before you imagine your website running on autopilot, let’s talk about the realities of what these features do, where they can add value to your publishing workflow, and where to proceed with caution.
WordPress 7 is a major update with a lot going on: new collaboration tools, a refreshed admin interface, and a long list of core improvements. But the AI features are getting all the attention. So that’s where we’ll focus.
How the AI Features Work
To use WordPress’ new AI capabilities, you’ll need to connect to your own AI provider, such as Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), or Google (Gemini). These features run on your API keys, which means they draw from your token budget.
Once connected, you install WordPress’s AI plugin, which unlocks a handful of content-focused AI features that you can enable or disable. The ones most relevant to managing and publishing content are:
- Alt Text Generation: Generate descriptive alt text for images to improve accessibility.
- Content Summarization: Summarizes long-form content into digestible overviews.
- Editorial Notes: Reviews post content block-by-block and adds Notes with suggestions for Accessibility, Readability, Grammar, and SEO.
- Excerpt Generation: Automatically create concise summaries for your posts.
- Image Generation and Editing: Create and edit images from post content in the editor, also via the Media Library.
- Title Generation: Generate title suggestions for your posts.
On paper, this list looks impressive. In practice, it’s more complicated.
Our Honest Take
Most of these features won’t fundamentally change publishing flows. A few, however, could make content teams more efficient. Let’s look at the good and bad.
The Good
The most useful AI features are the ones that handle tedious but important work:
- Alt text generation is a real win: accessibility is important, alt text is often an afterthought, and having a tool draft it removes a common bottleneck.
- Editorial notes, which review your content block by block for readability, grammar, and SEO, are similarly useful.
- Excerpt and title generation can also save time, as long as you treat the output as a starting point and not a finished product.
These features function like a lightweight copy editor running in the background.
The Bad
There are some trade-offs worth understanding before you dive in.
- It’s early. AI-native content tools are still maturing, and WordPress is no exception. The capabilities are promising, but the workflows and controls are still evolving.
- Slop is real. Your website reflects your organization’s credibility and point of view. AI can help generate content, but it cannot replace human judgment or expertise. The danger is not that AI creates bad content. The danger is that average content becomes easier to publish. Every suggestion should be reviewed and refined by a human editor.
- Costs add up. Connecting an AI provider to WordPress means every request consumes API credits. Costs may be minimal at first, but they can grow quickly if teams adopt these features without clear guidelines on when and how to use them.
- It adds complexity. These features require a connection to an external AI provider. That means managing API keys, monitoring usage, and understanding how content is processed relative to token usage.
What We Recommend
Focus on the features that solve real problems.
Use these features selectively and intentionally. Alt text and excerpt generation? Worth exploring. Title and image generation? Approach with caution, and always treat the output as a first draft that requires significant human editing.
We’ll continue tracking how these tools evolve, both in WordPress and across the broader content ecosystem. If you have questions about how WordPress 7 affects your site, or want to discuss how AI fits into your content strategy, we’d be happy to help.
