Write Better Content with WordPress 7’s Built-In AI

In my last post, I covered what WordPress 7’s AI infrastructure actually is and why it matters. The short version: WordPress now has a standardized way to connect to AI providers, and the three default options are Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), and Gemini (Google).

But knowing the infrastructure exists and knowing how to use it to actually write better content are two very different things.

This post is the second part. If you’ve got your connector set up and you’re staring at the editor wondering what to do next, this is where we pick up.

First, the Plugin You Actually Need

The connectors you set up under Settings → Connectors are just the plumbing. To get usable AI features inside the block editor, you also need to install the official AI plugin from WordPress.org (search “AI” by WordPress.org in your plugin directory).

Once it’s active, head to Settings → AI and you’ll see a list of experiments you can toggle on individually. Here’s the current lineup:

• Title Generation
• Excerpt Generation
• Content Summarization
• Alt Text Generation
• Meta Description Generation
• Review Notes
• Content Classification (tags and categories)

Turn on the ones that fit how you work. You don’t have to enable all of them. I’d suggest starting with Title Generation, Excerpt Generation, Review Notes, and Alt Text Generation. Those four cover the spots where most bloggers lose the most time.

Which AI Should You Use?

Here’s something most posts about this topic gloss over: you can use different AI providers for different tasks.

The Connectors system lets any compatible plugin tap into whatever provider is configured, and if you’ve set up more than one, some tools let you choose per task. Based on hands-on testing across the community, here’s how the three providers tend to perform for content work:

Claude is the strongest choice for text-based tasks. It produces the tightest, most natural excerpts and summaries, and its Review Notes read like feedback from an experienced editor rather than a checklist. If you care about your content sounding like a human wrote it, Claude is the one to use for writing and editing tasks.

Gemini does well with alt text. Its alt text generation is the most detailed, pulling in contextual information about what’s happening in images rather than just describing objects. If your content is image-heavy, Gemini is worth connecting just for that.

ChatGPT (OpenAI) handles image generation through DALL-E and turns in solid results for quick concept images. For straight text tasks it performs well, though it tends to feel slightly more formulaic than Claude.

The practical recommendation: connect Claude as your primary provider and use it for everything text-related. If you want Gemini for alt text, connect both. The Connectors screen makes it easy to manage.

What Each WordPress 7 AI Feature Actually Does in Your Workflow

Let’s walk through the WordPress 7 AI features that are most useful for a typical blog post, in the order you’d actually use them.

While You’re Writing: Review Notes

This is the one I’d use first and most often. Once your draft is in decent shape, click Generate Review Notes and the AI goes through your post block by block, flagging things like grammar issues, readability problems, missing alt text on images, and SEO gaps.

The notes show up as editor comments, not as changes to your content. You decide what to act on. Think of it as a second pass from an editor who catches the things you stopped seeing after your third re-read.

It’s like having a second editor pass on every post before you hit Publish. That’s a fair description. It doesn’t replace good writing, but it catches the things you miss when you’re too close to the content.

After You’ve Written: Title Generation

You’ve finished the post. Now you need a title. Click Regenerate Title and WordPress gives you three options based on your actual content.

The important thing here is to treat these as a starting point, not a final answer. Pick one, regenerate for more options, or use one as a starting point and edit it yourself. The AI reads your content and understands what the post is about, so the suggestions are usually relevant. But they won’t know your voice, your audience’s language, or the specific angle you’re going for. Use them to break the blank-title paralysis, then make one yours.

After the Title: Excerpt Generation

The excerpt is the 1-2 sentence summary that shows up in search results, social shares, and your blog archive. Most people either leave it blank (bad) or write something generic at the last second (not much better).

Excerpt Generation writes this from your content automatically. Read it, adjust the tone to match your voice, and move on. It takes about 30 seconds to review instead of 5 minutes to write from scratch.

On Images: Alt Text Generation

Alt text is one of those things everyone knows they should write and almost nobody takes the time to do well. The AI plugin can generate it for individual images as you add them to the editor, or you can run a bulk alt text generation across your media library for images that don’t have it yet.

This one’s worth enabling just for the accessibility and SEO benefit on images you’ve already published.

Before You Publish: Meta Description

Meta Description Generation produces SEO-friendly meta description suggestions that integrate with SEO plugins. Same principle as the excerpt: use it to get a solid starting draft, then read it and adjust for your voice and the specific keyword angle you’re targeting on that post.

What These Tools Don’t Do (and Why That Matters)

Here’s the honest part.

The AI features inside WordPress 7 are genuinely useful for the finishing work on a post: tightening up the metadata, catching editorial gaps, generating starting points for titles and excerpts. They save real time on the parts of publishing that aren’t writing.

What they don’t do is write the post for you in any meaningful way. The current editor experiments don’t have a “draft this section” or “write the next paragraph” feature. The AI responds to your content, it doesn’t generate it from scratch.

And honestly, for most bloggers and content creators, that’s fine. The writing itself should come from you. The structural and metadata work around it is where AI saves the most time with the least risk to your voice.

If you want AI to help with the actual writing, research, outlining, and drafting, you’re talking about a workflow that lives outside the WordPress editor, in a tool like Claude.ai or ChatGPT, before the content comes into WordPress at all. That’s a different conversation about building a content system, not just using a feature.

(If that’s what you’re after, that’s exactly what AI Author Lab is built around.)

The One Thing to Watch

One heads-up worth flagging: API keys stored through the Connectors UI are masked in the interface but not encrypted in the database. For most small sites and personal blogs this is low-risk in practice, but it’s worth knowing. If you’re on managed hosting with a security-conscious setup, this is already handled. If you manage your own server, keep it in mind.

Quick Setup Checklist

If you’re starting from scratch:

1. Update to WordPress 7 if you haven’t already
2. Go to Settings → Connectors and install your preferred AI provider (Claude is my recommendation for text work)
3. Add your API key
4. Go to Plugins → Add New and search “AI” by WordPress.org, then install and activate it
5. Go to Settings → AI and toggle on Title Generation, Excerpt Generation, Review Notes, and Alt Text Generation
6. Write a post, then use Review Notes before you publish and Title Generation to check your headline

That’s it. The features are lightweight, the setup takes about 10 minutes, and the time savings show up immediately on anything you publish regularly.

If you haven’t set up your connectors yet, my previous post walks through exactly how to do that and explains the infrastructure behind it.