Research shows these AI-generated results are becoming increasingly common. One 2026 study found Google AI Overviews appeared for 13.7% of trending queries overall and nearly 65% of question-based searches.

Beyond SEO best practices, your website needs to do more than just rank. It needs to clearly communicate who you are, what you offer, who you help, and why someone should trust you.

TLDR: AI discovery is becoming a new growth channel — one built less on publishing more, and more on making your website and business easier to understand.

AI as a new growth channel

Google has been expanding AI-powered search experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode, while its guidance explains how websites can appear in AI features in Search.

But the goal is not to chase AI overview optimization as a separate trick from SEO. The bigger opportunity is what happens before someone clicks: AI tools increasingly help people compare options, summarize trade-offs, and decide who belongs in the conversation.

That makes AI discovery a new growth channel, but not in the “hack the algorithm” sense. Highly cited websites make their value unmistakable: who they help, what they offer, why they are credible, and what makes their work different.

That clarity is harder to build when your story is scattered across social profiles, videos, newsletters, and review sites. Those channels can help people discover you, but they are not a substitute for your own website.

Third-party platforms control the algorithm, the audience, and the experience. Your website lets you control the message, the structure, and the relationship with your audience.

When your website clearly explains your unique offering, AI tools have less to infer and more to understand.

The goal: Don’t publish more for the sake of it. Build a reliable home base that makes your work easier for people and AI systems to understand.

4 things AI tools need to understand about you

AI systems do not understand a website because it publishes frequently. They understand it when information is clear, consistent, and specific. Four areas matter most:

1. A clear explanation of who you help

Visitors should be able to quickly understand what you do, who you serve, what problem you solve, and what action they should take next.

The same clarity helps AI systems categorize and interpret your website. Avoid relying on vague marketing language that forces visitors to decode your positioning.

A simple framework such as “We help [audience] achieve [outcome] through [offer]” often provides a strong starting point.

From there, create dedicated pages for major services, products, audiences, or use cases. Websites that serve multiple customer groups should explain each audience separately. If you have multiple offerings, you should give each its own landing page.

Instead of keyword stuffing, you need to make your expertise easy to understand.

2. Useful answers to customer questions

AI search is heavily influenced by questions.

People ask AI tools how to compare options, what something costs, what mistakes to avoid, who a product is best suited for, and what steps they should take next. Websites that publish useful answers to those questions create content that serves both customers and AI systems.

Think about the conversations you have before a sale. Prospective customers often want guidance before they are ready to buy. A designer might explain how to prepare for a website redesign. An accountant might outline tax considerations for new companies. A consultant might compare different approaches to solving a common operational challenge.

This type of content acts as decision support rather than promotion.

A blog is often the best place to publish these resources. Blog posts can connect naturally to service pages, product pages, pricing information, newsletters, and contact forms. That structure helps visitors navigate your expertise while helping AI systems understand how topics relate to one another.

The more connected your content is, the easier it becomes for people and AI systems to see the shape of your expertise.

3. Visible trust signals

AI discovery is about relevance as much as credibility

Your website should make it easy to see that a real person, team, or organization stands behind the content.

Useful trust signals include:

• A detailed About page
• Clear contact information
• Author or ownership details
• Testimonials and customer stories
• Case studies or portfolio examples
• Accurate dates on time-sensitive content
• Transparent service, product, or pricing information

You do not need enterprise-scale authority signals. Most small teams and independent website owners simply need enough evidence to demonstrate expertise and legitimacy.

Specific, trustworthy information helps AI systems interpret your content more confidently. It also helps potential customers feel comfortable taking the next step.

4. A website that brings it all together

There is no guaranteed way to earn AI citations, recommendations, or visibility. But AI discovery is not a mystery either. It starts with making your website easier to understand.

That means your most important pages should be public, crawlable, and clear. Your homepage, About page, service or product pages, and key customer questions should explain what you do, who you help, and why someone should trust you.

The same structure that helps people navigate your site also supports AI search optimization. Clear headings, useful answers, internal links, text-based information, fast page load times, secure hosting, and accurate structured data all help search systems interpret your content with greater confidence.

The deeper point is this: website discoverability improves when your site feels like a complete, reliable source of truth. Not a thin homepage. Not scattered social posts. Not a collection of disconnected updates. A real home base that explains your work clearly and grows with you.

That is the foundation worth investing in before you worry about AI overview optimization or any new search label. The stronger your website is, the easier it becomes for people and AI systems to understand why your work matters.

Build your AI-ready home base with WordPress.com

The web is filling up with AI-generated answers. That makes having your own corner of the internet more valuable, not less.

When someone asks an AI tool about your industry, your product, your expertise, or the problem you solve, what should they find: a scattered collection of social posts and platform profiles or a website that clearly explains who you are, what you do, and why people trust you?

With the WordPress.com AI Website Builder, you can launch a site quickly and shape it around your work. With the WordPress AI Assistant and other AI tools on WordPress.com, you can create and improve content faster. And with built-in managed hosting, security, and performance, you can focus less on maintenance and more on building something worth discovering.

AI can generate answers, and your website should be where the answers come from.

Studio is the fastest way to spin up a real WordPress site on your own computer. No Apache config. No Docker. No “it works on my machine.” Just click Add site, and a few seconds later you’ve got a working WordPress install ready to build on, connected to your favorite editor, and shareable with collaborators through a one-click preview link.

And it’s free and open source.

A UI for local WordPress development on Linux

Studio on Linux has the same features developers already rely on to build sites, plugins, and themes:

• Instant local WordPress sites with no servers to configure
• Custom domains and HTTPS for your local sites, so you can develop against realistic URLs
• One-click preview links to share your work-in-progress with clients, teammates, or testers
• Two-way sync with WordPress.com, so you can pull a production or staging site to your laptop and push changes back when you’re ready
• Open in your favorite editor — VS Code, PhpStorm, Sublime, and others, detected automatically
• A built-in assistant to help you write code, make changes, and debug

Built for the way Linux developers work

WordPress powers a huge slice of the open web, and Linux powers the servers that most of the web runs on — the tool you use to build WordPress sites locally should run there, too.

The CLI version of Studio has been on Linux for a few weeks; now the desktop experience matches what macOS and Windows users have relied on for years.

How to get Studio on Linux

Studio for Linux is available to download today. Head over to the Studio download page, grab the Linux build, and you’ll be up and running on Ubuntu in a few minutes.

We’re continuing to polish the Linux experience, and auto-updates, broader distro support, and more packaging options are on the way. The more we hear from you, the faster we’ll get there. Try it out and share feedback on GitHub.

Look at the projects below, and you’ll see that WordPress.com is becoming a better place to write, build, sell, prototype, repurpose, and tinker.

WordPress.com has always evolved to make publishing, building, and managing sites easier. What’s shifting now is context. AI gets a lot more useful the moment it understands your site, your content, your workflow, and what you’re actually trying to make.

Note: Many of these features are still in beta and are actively evolving. 

What is Radical Speed Month?

Radical Speed Month is a creative experiment led by developers, designers, marketers, and many others across the Automattic team to build, ship, and test WordPress.com features faster.

Rather than chasing perfection, the goal was to move quickly before ideas got too precious, share what was in progress, and iterate in real time based on your feedback.

Radical Speed Month produced a multitude of experiments, features, and prototypes. 

Here are 10 that stood out:

1. Workspace
2. WordCamp Agent
3. Blueprints Gallery
4. Achievements
5. Easy Site Editor
6. Lately
7. A short-form social media theme 
8. Social Feeds
9. Write
10. Wapuu-Studio

These projects differ from one another, but the same patterns keep showing up: publishing is getting lighter, development is getting faster, creator workflows are becoming more flexible, and AI is moving from “write this for me” to “help me work.”

The projects below span publishing, development, AI, and creator workflows. Together, they offer a small snapshot of what teams across Automattic explored during Radical Speed Month.

1. Workspace

What is WordPress Workspace? WordPress Workspace is a desktop app that brings WordPress Agent into your Mac workflow.

The highlight here is context. Instead of bouncing between a browser, notes app, media library, an AI assistant, and file uploads, Workspace gives people a way to work with WordPress within the flow of their day.

You can ask questions about your site, dictate thoughts, upload screenshots and images, transform selected text, and get help without rebuilding the same context over and over.

Why it stands out: your WordPress site already contains the shape of your work – posts, pages, media, products, audience context, drafts, and ideas. Workspace treats that context as something useful while work is happening, not only after something is ready to publish.

2. WordCamp Agent 

What is WordCamp Agent? WordCamp Agent is a Telegram assistant built for WordCamp attendees. It can help you plan your trip, browse the conference schedule, remember your interests and preferences, save notes during sessions, and turn those notes into a post or recap later.

The highlight is context. WordCamp Agent is powered by WordPress Guidelines, the system under the hood that stores agent-facing knowledge directly inside WordPress: instructions, memories, skills, and artifacts.

Why it stands out: Useful AI depends on useful context. A one-off prompt can help with one task, but a structured memory layer can support many workflows over time. WordCamp Agent shows what that looks like in practice: a WordPress-powered assistant that can remember, respond, and help people move from information to action.

3. Blueprints Gallery (WordPress Studio)

What is the Blueprints Gallery? The Blueprints Gallery is a feature in WordPress Studio that lets developers launch reusable WordPress environments from preconfigured blueprints.

The highlight is practical speed. Instead of rebuilding the same local setup again and again, users can launch reusable WordPress environments from preconfigured blueprints.

That reduces setup work and makes it easier to prototype, test, and share development patterns.

Why it stands out: it removes repeated work without asking developers to give up flexibility. If the first hour of a project is usually setup, configuration, and remembering what worked last time, reusable environments change the pace of the work.

4. Achievements

What are WordPress.com Achievements? WordPress.com Achievements is a feature that celebrates progress and milestones on WordPress.com, helping creators track their momentum as they publish.

Publishing frequently is a habit worth cultivating – and this feature encourages just that.

Why it stands out: better tools should not make people feel removed from their work. They should help people stay on track.

5. Easy Site Editor

What is Easy Site Editor? Easy Site Editor is an experiment that makes editing a WordPress site feel more approachable.

The goal is to make the path from idea to update easier to follow.

Why it stands out: WordPress has depth, flexibility, and extensibility. The challenge is helping more people access that power without needing to understand everything at once.

This points toward clearer site-building workflows for creators updating pages, agencies working with clients, businesses iterating on offers, and new users getting their first site into shape.

AI can suggest, generate, and automate. But the editing experience still has to feel understandable.

6. Lately

What is Lately? Lately is a messaging-first publishing experiment that lets you create private weekly letters by chatting with WordPress Agent.

Instead of asking users to begin inside a traditional editor, Lately lets them interact with WordPress Agent through a lightweight conversational workflow to create private weekly letters.

The highlight is capture. Ideas do not always arrive when someone is sitting in front of a blank editor. They show up in messages, notes, quick reflections, and half-formed thoughts.

Lately explores what happens when WordPress meets people closer to that moment.

Why it stands out: it connects lightweight capture and AI-assisted shaping back to a publishing system the user controls.

7. Theme for Short-Form Blogging

What is the theme for short-form blogging? This short-form social media theme is a WordPress.com theme for lightweight, social-style publishing.

The highlight is immediacy. Not every post needs to be a long essay. Sometimes people want to publish a thought, a link, an image, an update, a reblog, or a quick reflection.

Social platforms made that behavior feel natural, but they also trained creators to build on rented feeds.

Why it stands out: this project brings some of that casual publishing energy back to a space the creator owns.

8. Social Feeds

What is Social Feeds? Social Feeds brings Bluesky, Mastodon, and the wider Fediverse into the WordPress.com Reader.

The highlight is connection. Instead of jumping between social apps, users can follow people, read posts, react, reply, and publish from one place inside WordPress.com.

For creators, the useful part is choice. A quick thought can stay short and social. But when it grows into something bigger, WordPress.com gives it somewhere to go: a post, a site, an archive, and a home the creator owns.

Why it stands out: Social Feeds fits neatly with the short-form blogging theme. Together, they point to a more flexible publishing loop: read, react, post, expand, repurpose, and publish across formats without giving up ownership.

9. Write

What is Write? Write is a simplified posting experience built for writers on WordPress.com. It gives you one page, a blinking cursor, and only the formatting tools you need when you need them.

The highlight is focus. Instead of starting inside the full block editor, Write gives creators a cleaner surface for getting words down quickly. The interface stays intentionally minimal, then brings in formatting when it helps and gets out of the way when it doesn’t.

For writers, the useful part is flow. Write posts are still real WordPress posts, so they live alongside your other content, work with your theme, and can be opened in the block editor later if you want more control.

Why it stands out: Write fits with the broader push toward lighter, faster publishing workflows. Alongside Lately, the short-form blogging theme, and Social Feeds, WordPress.com is exploring more ways to help people capture ideas, publish quickly, and stay in control of where their work lives.

10. Wapuu Studio

What is Wapuu Studio? Wapuu Studio is an AI-powered tool that lets you create and share your own custom Wapuu with the WordPress community.

The highlight is creativity. Simply describe the Wapuu you’re imagining—its mood, outfit, theme, colors, or tiny adventure—and Wapuu Studio turns that idea into a unique character. You can browse community creations, remix ideas, and share your own designs.

Why it stands out: Not every RSM project is about productivity. Wapuu Studio shows how AI can also make it easier to create, play, and participate in the WordPress community. It transforms a simple prompt into something visual, personal, and shareable while celebrating one of WordPress’s most recognizable mascots.

Bonus: Clips (coming soon)

What is Clips? Clips is a feature that turns WordPress.com posts into short-form video.

The highlight is repurposing. Written content often needs to be adapted for social, video, promotional, or campaign materials. But repurposing takes time, tools, and a separate production process.

Clips explores a simpler model: start with the post, then generate short-form video from the same source material.

Why it stands out: A blog post becomes more than a final output. It becomes a source of truth that can feed other formats.

Check back on WordPress.com/blog to catch Clips when it becomes available. 

Radical Speed Month projects at a glance

Start exploring what WordPress.com makes possible

Radical Speed Month showed the range of ideas Automatticians are bringing to life on WordPress.com: Whether it’s a cleaner way to write, a faster way to prototype, a more connected Reader, a custom Wapuu, or new ways to publish in formats that feel natural.

Some of these tools are built for work. Others are personal, creative, experimental, or somewhere in between. 

Many of these features are available to try now on WordPress.com paid plans. 

If you’re new to WordPress.com, compare plans to get access to the latest tools and find the ideal setup for your site.

Starting today, developers and their AI agents can provision a complete WordPress.com site, register a domain name, and activate a plan directly from the CLI. All this without opening a browser, logging in to a dashboard, or switching tools.

So if you’re already working in Stripe Projects, WordPress.com is now one command away. It’s one more step toward making WordPress.com easier to build with inside modern developer workflows.

Build and launch without leaving the terminal

For developers building with AI agents, CLI tools, and repeatable workflows, setup friction matters.

Now you can link your Stripe account to a WordPress.com account (or create a new one on the spot), then spin up a site, grab a domain name, and choose a plan — all from your terminal.

The full flow happens programmatically, which means it fits cleanly into the way developers already work: automated, repeatable, no UI required.

Joining Stripe Projects is a natural fit for WordPress.com. Developers already use Stripe to power payments, now they can spin up a full WordPress.com site, register a domain name, and choose a plan in the same workflow, without ever switching context. We built this so developers can move faster and spend less time on setup.

— Ian Stewart, Artistic Director and WordPress.com Lead

How the WordPress.com provider works

Adding WordPress.com to Stripe Projects means a production-ready WordPress site, domain, and plan can be provisioned without jumping between dashboards.

Once you have a Stripe account, Stripe Projects CLI installed and your project set up, use the commands below from your terminal.

To create a WordPress.com site:

stripe projects add wordpress.com/site

You’ll be presented with site plans, including a free option. Once you pick a plan, the site is created and billed to the payment method you already have on file with Stripe.

To register a domain:

stripe projects add wordpress.com/domain

Enter a query or the domain name you want. You’ll see 15 domain name suggestions to choose from, and once you select one, it’s automatically registered using your Stripe payment method.

If you don’t have a WordPress.com account, one will be created and linked to your Stripe account as part of the flow.

What WordPress.com brings to the stack

WordPress.com powers millions of production sites, including storefronts, business properties, and merchant sites running at scale. It comes with managed hosting, automatic updates, security, and a full domain marketplace built in.

For developers who want a production-ready site without the infrastructure overhead, it fits without adding complexity to the stack.

And now it’s available without the signup flow.

WordPress.com is live on Stripe Projects today. Install the Projects CLI at projects.dev or explore WordPress.com’s developer tools at developer.wordpress.com to see how managed WordPress fits into modern app and agent workflows.

WordCamp Europe 2026 drew 2,458 attendees from 81 countries to the ICE Kraków Congress Centre — a stunning modern venue sitting at the edge of one of Europe’s most historically rich cities. Nearly a quarter of us were first-timers. I was in good company.

The city told the story 

What struck me immediately about Kraków: it’s the kind of place where history is visible, tangible, and layered. Contrast that with the ICE Congress Centre — glass, light, sharp angles, forward momentum — and something clicks.

This is WordPress.

A platform that started as a blogging tool in 2003 and now powers 43% of the internet. Ancient roots in the online publishing era, yet somehow relentlessly modern. Still building. That metaphor was immediately obvious.

Before the sessions: The people, the pins, the Wapuus

I arrived on Contributor Day, the pre-conference session where the WordPress community gathers to contribute — code, documentation, community planning. Meanwhile, members of the WordPress.com team were in a nearby hotel room unpacking boxes of custom pins, matching t-shirts, and carefully curated swag to hand out at our booth. That’s the texture of this community: people who show up early, do the behind-the-scenes work, and genuinely want to be here, together.

Across the floor, our team was deep in demo prep — walking through the latest features, pressure-testing the flow, making sure every talking point was sharp before the doors opened. The pride our team takes in their work, and in the people using our products, spoke for itself.

The Wapuus were everywhere. If you’re new to WordCamp and new to Wapuu — the round, cheerful “official unofficial” WordPress mascot that each WordCamp reimagines in local style — I hope you were as delighted to meet the Kraków edition as I was.

I started with toast

My first session was called How to Make Toast, led by Stacy L. Carlson.

I sat next to Uffe Christiansen, a partner in the Automattic for Agencies program, and we worked through the exercise together. The premise: map out how to make toast. Every step. Don’t skip anything.

Sounds simple. It isn’t. Groups within the session came up with wildly different process maps — anywhere from 3 steps to 20. Use pre-sliced bread or cut from a whole loaf? Plug in the toaster first or load the bread? How dark is dark enough — and who decides?

That’s the exercise. Not toast. Assumptions. The steps we skip because we think they’re obvious. The judgment calls we make automatically that someone else makes completely differently.

If you can’t map your own process, you can’t hand it off — to a team member, to a tool, to an AI. Toast first. Everything else second.

The search conversation continues IRL

I lead a content team that has spent the last year working to meet customers where they are as their search behavior shifts — from SEO to AIO and beyond. So I was grateful to see this topic represented across nearly every session block. Here’s what I heard, across multiple sessions, from multiple speakers:

The old rules still hold — they just have higher stakes. Great content, real perspective, genuine expertise. These have always mattered. Now they’re table stakes for being cited at all. The tools change; the fundamentals don’t.

Brand is the new backlink. The brands winning in AI-driven search have something in common: consistent opinions, real customer data, a distinct voice, presence across multiple platforms, and the discipline to show up the same way everywhere. Simple in theory. Hard in practice. When you get it right, it starts to reinforce itself.

We’re not chasing clicks anymore. We’re chasing citations. Multiple 2026 studies on AI citation patterns found that 85% of brand mentions in AI responses come from third-party pages — not your own domain. Content strategies built entirely around Google rank are already working from an incomplete map.

AI traffic converts at a higher rate — because AI pre-qualified your brand. If an LLM cites you, the person clicking already trusts you. That changes the math on what “less traffic” actually means.

It’s not “is this good.” It’s “is this different.” Commodity content — content that sounds like everyone else’s content — doesn’t get cited. Original research, real data, genuine point of view: those are citation magnets.

AI won’t save your marketing. That was the title of one session. The tools change. The fundamentals don’t. Know your customers, read your report tickets and your reviews. Solve those problems, and write about it.

And underneath all of it, a direction that felt significant: SEO is no longer an isolated discipline. It’s merging with AIO, brand strategy, PR, and content — a more holistic practice where all the signals work together more than ever before.

Accessibility isn’t a feature. It’s core to the conference.

One thing I didn’t expect: how intentional this community is about inclusion — not as a talking point, but as an operational standard.

Free childcare was available onsite. Sessions addressed neurodivergence. One talk made the case that optimizing for accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s better for the business. Industry research backs it up — 75% of organizations report accessibility directly contributes to improved revenue, and 62% of business leaders say customers have abandoned transactions because of inaccessible experiences. The open web is most valuable when it’s accessible to everyone. Customers benefit. Businesses benefit. It’s not charity; it’s smart design.

Some things don’t change

I didn’t expect a conference about the future of the web to keep coming back to the same old truth. But it did. No shortcuts. Hard work, authenticity, consistency — they cut through the noise now the same way they always have.

The technology changes. AIO, SEO, vibe coding, AI agents — the landscape looks nothing like it did five years ago and will look nothing like this in five more. But the core principles haven’t moved. Know your customer. Serve their needs in a way only you can. Be consistent. Be real. Do the work.

That’s not just advice for your content strategy. It’s how this community operates. It’s why people fly to Kraków from 81 countries to sit in workshops about toast, debate the future of search, and unpack boxes of pins in hotel rooms before the doors open.

If you’ve never been to a WordCamp, go. If not just for the sessions, then for the reminder that the fundamentals still hold, that the people building the open web are worth knowing, and that there is no algorithm, no AI, no shortcut that replaces doing something genuinely worth your audience’s time.

WordPress.com has been part of this community since the beginning, built on the same principles the whole conference kept coming back to. If you’re ready to build something on the open web, we’d love to have you.

First WordCamp in the books. Find one near you — or mark your calendar for a flagship:

• WordCamp US — Phoenix, Arizona, August 16–19, 2026
• WordCamp Asia 2027 — Penang, Malaysia, April 9–11, 2027
• WordCamp Europe 2027 — Málaga, Spain, May 27–29, 2027
• WordCamp India — TBD, 2027

And please, keep the Wapuus coming.

Studio Code is an agentic WordPress expert that lives in your terminal, helping you build sites, plugins, and themes locally on your computer. It’s part of the WordPress Studio suite of tools. Just describe what you want in plain language, and it gets to work. Think of it as a senior WordPress developer helping you build, with deep knowledge of WordPress baked in.

One of my favorite features built into Studio Code is a powerful little slash command called /annotate. 

I told so many people about this feature at the booth, over Slack, and in hallway conversations with colleagues because it helps me solve a problem that I always have with similar coding agents: the classic screenshot-arrow-request feedback loop.

Without /annotate:

1. My coding agent creates something.
2. I don’t like a few elements, so I take screenshots of the things I don’t like and manually annotate it with arrows. 
3. I upload the screenshots back to the agent, explaining the changes I want.
4. Repeat forever until the coding agent gets it right.

But with /annotate:

1. Studio Code creates something. 
2. I want to make some changes, so I type /annotate.
3. It launches a browser window where I can click on specific elements to give feedback, lump the feedback together, and send it all back to Studio Code at the same time.
4. Studio Code makes the specific changes I requested all in one go.

Remember Marco, the agency partner I mentioned at the beginning? As I was demonstrating this feature in Studio Code for Marco, a colleague (Davi!) mentioned that this would be a time-saver and an excellent user experience to run /annotate while on a call with clients. 

Picture this: you’re on a call with a client, sharing your screen, walking through the site you built them. They point out changes as you talk. You drop annotations, as many as you want, as specific as you want, and Studio Code makes every edit when you’re done.

No more endless feedback loops. One /annotate session, and all of their changes are live on your local site. Then you can push the updated version to your client’s live WordPress.com-hosted site in just a few clicks.

Studio Code is currently in beta, and you can try it by downloading Studio CLI (either from the desktop app or directly from your terminal) and running studio code. Then simply select or create a local site and run /annotate to try this feature out for yourself.

As a reminder, tokens are unlimited while Studio Code is in beta — build, iterate, and give us feedback on GitHub.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog!

We have lots to update you on, including information about a new core version running on every WordPress.com site, how you can repurpose your written blog content in audio and visual forms, and so much more.

Core

WordPress 7.0 is here

WordPress 7.0 (“Armstrong”) shipped on May 20, and your WordPress.com site has been automatically updated.

The pieces you’ll experience right away:

• See what changed before you hit publish: Your post revisions now have visual markers to help you understand changes in a more intuitive way.
• Design your mobile menu like you design the rest of your site: Navigation overlays give the mobile experience its own dedicated editing canvas.
• Show different things on phone, tablet, and desktop: Responsive block visibility lets you pick which blocks appear on which device without writing CSS.
• More design pieces out of the box: New Breadcrumbs and Icon blocks, plus finer block-level controls for when you want a specific change.
• One place to manage your fonts: To use across every theme on your site.

On WordPress.com, this release ships with our AI features already in place to assist you in the editor, with your favorite AI agent, and beyond, plus real-time collaboration on select plans, so multiple people can write in the same post at once.

Reader

One place to read Bluesky, Mastodon, and blogs

Keeping up with your audience shouldn’t mean tab-hopping between different apps. Connect your Bluesky, Mastodon, or Fediverse accounts to the WordPress.com Reader and you can read those timelines next to the WordPress.com blogs you already follow — and like, repost, quote, and reply — in the Social Feeds section.

You can write to those followers from the same place. Start with a short social post, and if you need more room, expand it into a full blog post without starting over.

One spot to read what matters, react to it, and publish your own thoughts.

Writing

When you’re in the flow, the editor gets out of your way

Sometimes you just want to write. Not pick a block, not configure a layout, not browse a sidebar — just write. Write is exactly that: one page, a blinking cursor, simple formatting, and nothing else.

It’s in beta on every WordPress.com plan, including Free. Open Write, pick your site, and start typing. What you write is a real WordPress post — it lives alongside everything else, works with your theme, and you can open it in the full block editor whenever you need the rest of the toolkit.

Reach the people who’d rather listen than read

Whether your audience is commuting, multitasking, or simply prefers to learn through audio, your content can meet them there.

Posts to Podcast turns a post you’ve already written into a two-host conversation episode, saves it to your Media Library, and queues a draft post with the audio and transcript so you can publish in a couple of clicks. One post, two ways for people to find you.

Find it in your dashboard under Media → Create AI Podcast. Available on every WordPress.com site.

P.S. If you want to host the podcast on WordPress.com instead, you can also set up podcasting with Jetpack Podcast and publish episodes from your site.

Spin a post into a short social-ready video (experimental preview)

Short-form video (like on Instagram and TikTok) is popular and engaging, but turning a blog post into one has meant needing a second tool, a video editor, or someone you pay.

Feature Clips generates a short, vertical video based on your post content directly from the editor sidebar. Pick a suggestion drawn from your post, or write your own prompt to steer the look.

Your clip lands in your Media Library, ready to share to Instagram via Jetpack Social or download as an MP4 for TikTok and YouTube Shorts. It generates short instrumental clips meant to tease your content.

Available now on WordPress.com plans that support video uploads — Premium and up. You get ten generations per site per day, with a thumbs up / thumbs down feedback tool on each clip so you can easily send your thoughts back to our team.

Settings and plans

Shape your URLs (and four more settings) on every paid plan

The structure of your URLs matters — for SEO, for sharing, for how users understand your site at a glance. That setting (called Permalinks) used to be locked behind higher plans. Now, every paid plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan (Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce) can change permalink structure directly.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped some reliability and polish updates across the WordPress.com experience:

• The Reader sidebar now shows your site’s custom domain instead of its free subdomain.
• Receipt amount, type, and date now show inline on your Billing History page at narrower widths.

WordPress 7.0 includes both immediate editor improvements and deeper foundational changes. Some improvements are visible right away, like visual revisions, responsive controls, and a cleaner dashboard. Others work behind the scenes are more foundational, giving plugins, tools, and AI services a more consistent way to work with WordPress over time.

The result: A release that makes everyday site work smoother and opens the door to optional AI tools that actually feel a part of WordPress.

For a deeper technical look, check out the WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth. 

What’s new in WordPress 7.0

WordPress 7.0 brings updates across AI, editing, design, performance, accessibility, and developer tooling. These changes affect how you build, update, and manage your sites.

WordPress 7.0 updates include:

• AI foundations: The AI Client, Connectors API, and Connectors screen give WordPress a more consistent way to connect with AI providers and external services.
• Editing and admin improvements: Visual revisions, a refreshed dashboard, smoother transitions, Command Palette access, and broader font management make everyday site work clearer.
• Flexible design controls: Custom navigation overlays, responsive block visibility, and pattern editing make it easier to shape pages without adding workarounds.
• New and improved blocks: Breadcrumbs, Icons, gallery lightbox improvements, Heading block updates, and block-level styling controls bring more practical tools into the editor.
• Performance, accessibility, and developer updates: Under-the-hood improvements support faster loading, better editor stability, stronger accessibility, and more consistent foundations for plugins and custom builds.

Building a foundation for AI workflows

WordPress 7.0 introduces a new shared AI layer designed to make AI tools feel more native across WordPress.

Instead of every plugin building its own separate AI setup, WordPress now includes a common system for connecting tools and services. Plugins can communicate with AI models such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini through the new AI Client. The Connectors screen provides site owners with a single place to manage those integrations.

Note: These AI features are optional and need to be enabled by the site owner. Nothing is automatically shared with AI services when WordPress 7.0 is installed.

The optional AI plugin already brings features like title and excerpt generation, image generation and editing, and suggested alt text directly into the editor. As more plugins build on the same system, AI tools across WordPress become easier to use, manage, and extend.

On WordPress.com, this builds on AI tools already available across the platform, including the AI Assistant, Claude connections, and WordPress Studio workflows.

Want to understand how this all fits together? Take a closer look at how WordPress 7.0 is building the foundation for AI-powered sites.

Creative freedom inside the editor

Visual revisions make it easier to understand changes in a post or page. Instead of scanning a dense comparison view, you can review revision history with visual markers, navigate versions, and restore the one you want with greater confidence.

The dashboard also feels more modern and cohesive. WordPress 7.0 introduces a new default admin color scheme, smoother screen transitions, and a Command Palette shortcut in the top admin bar for faster access to tools.

Font management is also easier. The Font Library now works across block, hybrid, and classic themes, giving more sites one place to browse, install, upload, and manage fonts.

A new canvas for every screen

Designing for mobile used to mean making compromises. WordPress 7.0 changes that with a dedicated canvas for navigation overlays, responsive block visibility, and simpler pattern editing.

Navigation overlays now have their own editing canvas, allowing mobile menus to go beyond a simple list of links. You can start with a template or build your own overlay with blocks, columns, typography, and custom close buttons.

Responsive block visibility lets you choose which blocks appear on desktop, tablet, or mobile. That makes it easier to create cleaner layouts for different devices while keeping alternate versions available as you iterate.

Patterns are also simpler to update. A pattern can behave like a single block, so you can swap text and images or adjust styles without digging through every nested block. Advanced controls are still available when you need them.

Flexible design tools for richer layouts

WordPress 7.0 brings more practical control into the editor, making it easier to shape pages without relying on extra tools for every small design need.

The new Breadcrumbs block helps visitors understand where they are on a site, while the Icon block adds simple visual cues from a built-in library. Gallery lightbox improvements make image browsing smoother, and Heading block updates make it easier to work with page structure.

The same idea carries through to layout and styling. Responsive block visibility lets you choose which content appears on different screen sizes, while block-level CSS gives more control over individual blocks when a page needs a custom touch.

Taken together, these updates make WordPress feel more flexible in the places site owners work most: building pages, refining layouts, and helping visitors move through a site more easily.

A stronger platform for WordPress development

WordPress 7.0 provides developers with a more consistent foundation for building plugins, blocks, patterns, and site-editing experiences.

The release includes expanded APIs, PHP-only block registration, a more extensible Site Editor, and routing improvements that make it easier for plugins to build custom Site Editor pages.

These updates will not be visible to every site owner on day one, but they matter because they shape what WordPress developers can build next. Better foundations mean better tools, workflows, and site experiences over time.

Built by the WordPress community

WordPress 7.0 is a reminder of how open source software keeps evolving through shared contribution. The release reflects work from more than 875 contributors around the world. That community work is part of what makes WordPress different.

WordPress 7.0: Fully Managed on WordPress.com

WordPress.com is here to bring the best of every new WordPress release to you fast and without the setup. 

WordPress 7.0 is no different. The new AI foundations build on tools already live across the platform, including the AI Assistant, Claude connections, and Studio workflows. 

And on select plans, real-time collaboration is already available, letting teams work on the same site simultaneously, before it’s widely available elsewhere.

All of it backed by the security, performance, and support that comes with a fully managed platform.

You bring the vision. We handle everything else.

This month, we added a new Social Feeds section to the Reader. Now you can bring in the people you follow on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and across the Fediverse. Then read, react, and post, all without leaving the Reader.

One place to read, with more people to follow

The Reader has always been one place to catch up on writing across the open web: WordPress.com blogs, Jetpack blogs, any blog with an RSS feed. That part hasn’t changed. What’s new is the company you can keep there.

In the left navigation, you’ll find a new Social Feeds section, with entries for your connected accounts. Connected social accounts include:

• Bluesky: and the wider ATmosphere, including Blacksky and other Bluesky‑compatible platforms.
• Mastodon: bring in your timeline from any instance, big or small.
• The Fediverse: via your own blog. If you have a WordPress.com site, you can join the Fediverse without creating a new account; your blog is your identity. Don’t have one yet? Start a blog, and you can join too. Our Social Web page is a good starting point if that’s new to you.

Pick a network, sign in once, and your timeline shows up in the Reader.

Already connected? You’re in

If you’ve ever used Jetpack Social to share your posts to Mastodon or Bluesky, those connections are already there. Open the Social Feeds section, and your accounts are waiting.

Read, react, and reply

Inside a Bluesky or Mastodon timeline, the actions are the ones you’d expect: like a post, repost it, quote it, reply to it. Same keyboard, same window, no second app.

Compose and post

The Reader is a place to write now, too. Click Compose, type a short post, attach an image, and send it to your followers on Bluesky, Mastodon, or the Fediverse.

When a thought outgrows a social post

WordPress.com is a tool for creators, and we didn’t want to box you into the character limits of any one network. So when a draft starts running long for a social post, the Reader offers to hand it off to your blog. You keep writing in a fresh post draft, with all the room you need, and once you hit Publish, it reaches your followers on Bluesky, Mastodon, and the Fediverse all the same.

Try Social in the Reader

Head over to WordPress.com/reader, expand the Social Feeds group in the sidebar, and connect an account. It’s free, and the support doc walks through the details if you’d like a closer look.

If you’d like more on how WordPress.com fits into the wider Social Web, our previous posts on the Social Web Foundation and our recent ActivityPub feature update are both good follow‑on reads.

Happy reading, and happy blogging!

One page. A blinking cursor. The formatting you need and nothing you don’t. That’s Write: a new, focused writing surface built into WordPress.com. In last year’s Creators survey, “simplify the editor” was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com. So we built it.

Write started as a plugin by Jamie Marsland, who asked a deceptively simple question: what would WordPress look like if it were designed purely for writers? We loved the answer enough that we brought the plugin into WordPress.com and built on it.

The interface is intentionally minimal: a clean page, a persistent top toolbar with the essentials, and formatting that appears when you need it and gets out of the way when you don’t.

Your Write posts are real WordPress posts. They live alongside your other posts, work with your theme, and you can open them in the block editor.

Write is in beta and ready to try (see our support article for setup details). The core writing experience is solid, but we’re still building, and we’d love your input on what to add next.

Ready to write? Head to wordpress.com/write-editor, pick a site, and start. Tell us what you think in the comments.

Co-authored by Kim Brown.