WordPress just gave its 20-year-old publishing platform a very 2026 upgrade: an AI assistant that sits right inside your dashboard and lets you redesign, rewrite, and even re-illustrate your site by talking to it in plain language. Instead of wrestling with menus and theme settings, you can now throw prompts at your site like “make this section feel more modern” or “add a testimonials block under this” and watch WordPress quietly do the heavy lifting in the background.

Crucially, this isn’t a bolt‑on chatbot that lives in a separate tab. The assistant embeds itself in three of the most important places you actually work: the block editor, the Media Library, and the newer “block notes” feature for in‑context collaboration. In the editor, it understands your layout and the block structure of each page, which means it can target individual sections, tweak styles, adjust spacing, and rewrite copy without you touching a single block setting. WordPress itself gives examples that sound almost flippant—“change my site colors to be more bright and bold,” “give me more font options that feel clean and professional,” “add a Contact page”—yet the assistant can execute all of those as real structural changes rather than just suggesting ideas in a chat window.

On the content side, it behaves like an always‑on editor who isn’t shy about taking your draft and pushing it a bit further. You can ask it to rewrite a paragraph to sound more confident, generate alternate headlines, translate a section into another language, or tighten up a clunky intro. Because it operates inside the document, there’s no copy‑paste dance between an AI tool and your CMS; the edits simply appear where you’re already working. For bloggers and solo creators who’ve been bouncing between ChatGPT or Claude and the WordPress editor, this collapses what used to be a multi‑step workflow into a single space.

The visual story is just as interesting. In the Media Library, WordPress has added a “Generate Image” button that taps Google’s Gemini “Nano Banana” image models to create new artwork or surgically edit existing images. That means you can ask for a “calico cat reading a book,” switch a hero image to black‑and‑white, or replace that stack of pancakes with waffles, all without leaving WordPress or juggling external image generators. You can also specify aspect ratios and styles, which is a subtle but important nod to people who care about visual consistency across a site—think newsletters, landing pages, and product shots that all feel like they belong to the same brand.

Then there are block notes, a collaboration feature that arrived with WordPress 6.9 and now quietly becomes smarter with an “@ai” mention. In practice, this turns WordPress into something closer to a shared Google Doc with a built‑in editor: you can ask “@ai please fact‑check this block,” request headline ideas, or ask for stronger examples to support a paragraph, and the assistant responds in‑place, using the surrounding content as context and pulling in relevant links when needed. For teams, that means feedback, suggestions, and AI support all live directly on the blocks they reference, instead of getting lost in Slack threads or email chains.

Availability is where the product strategy shows. WordPress is making the AI assistant free to sites on its Business and Commerce plans, with no extra subscription layered on top. If you built your site using the company’s AI website builder, the assistant is switched on automatically; everyone else can flip it on under Settings → “AI tools” in just a few clicks. Free‑plan sites, meanwhile, still have a separate AI assistant offering with a limited number of requests and a paid add‑on, but this new built‑in assistant is clearly being positioned as a flagship perk for higher‑tier customers. There’s an important caveat: it works best with modern block themes, and if you’re on an older classic theme, you won’t see it in the editor—though you can still generate and edit AI images in the Media Library.

The move also places subtle pressure on the ecosystem that has grown around WordPress. Over the last two years, plugin developers have rushed to ship AI‑powered tools for everything from copy suggestions to layout automation and image generation. Now, Automattic is effectively bundling many of those use cases into the core WordPress.com experience—at least for its hosted Business and Commerce customers—at no additional cost. Analysts already note that some third‑party plugins will have to differentiate fast, either by going deeper on “agentic” multi‑step workflows or by offering niche capabilities the built‑in assistant doesn’t touch, such as SEO‑specific optimization, ecommerce merchandising, or complex automations that cross multiple services.

If you zoom out, the launch slots neatly into a broader AI push from WordPress and its parent company, Automattic. Alongside this assistant, there’s a new Claude Cowork plugin that can spin up entire WordPress sites from a conversation, plus “Skills” that teach AI agents how to handle common site‑building tasks like theme design and layout. Where those tools focus on green‑field creation—turning a brief into a brand‑new site—the in‑dashboard assistant is about what happens next: the years of editing, iterating, and maintaining that site as your needs evolve. Together, they sketch a future where your relationship with WordPress looks less like manual configuration and more like ongoing dialogue: describe what you want, and the system translates that into themes, blocks, images, and copy.

The user reaction so far reflects the split that has defined much of AI’s march into creative tools. Some WordPress.com users are openly skeptical, worried about “AI slop” creeping into their blogs or about privacy and training data. WordPress is leaning hard on the fact that the assistant is strictly opt‑in: if you don’t enable it on your site, nothing changes, and your content isn’t suddenly being piped into some mysterious model without your consent. Others are more pragmatic, thankful it’s optional but curious enough to experiment, especially if it means spending less time wrestling with spacing, fonts, or that one stubborn section that never quite looks right.

For working site owners, the real test will be day‑to‑day use. Does asking WordPress to “make this section feel more modern and spacious” actually yield a layout you’d ship, or do you still spend 20 minutes manually adjusting margins and paddings afterward? Do AI‑generated images blend seamlessly with your brand, or stand out as stock‑ish art you end up replacing anyway? And can AI‑assisted block notes meaningfully speed up editorial workflows, or do they become yet another stream of suggestions to sift through? Early impressions from testers suggest the assistant is already competent at micro‑tasks—rewrites, translations, quick layout tweaks—and improving rapidly, but it’s still very much part of the broader, messy experiment of embedding AI directly into creative tools.

What’s clear is that WordPress is no longer content to be the neutral canvas where you bring work created in other AI tools. It wants to be the place where that work happens in the first place, with intelligence woven into the editor, the media library, and the collaboration layer rather than tacked on as an afterthought. For millions of site owners, that means a new way to think about editing: less about knobs and sliders, more about prompts and conversation—“change this, add that, try this version instead”—with the CMS doing the grunt work in the background. Whether you’re excited or wary, the age‑old question of “how do I edit my WordPress site?” now has a new, surprisingly simple answer: you just ask.