The terminology is new, but most of the work is not. AEO is largely an extension of good SEO and good writing: make useful information clear, credible, and easy for AI tools to cite.

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

If you’ve heard generative engine optimization (GEO), AI optimization (AIO), or LLM visibility tossed around and felt a step behind, you’re not missing something obvious. The terminology (and the operations behind it) is genuinely still settling. 

There isn’t a strong consensus on which term is “correct” yet. You’ll see several names for roughly the same kind of work. The boundaries appear fuzzy, but here’s the simplest way to think about them:

• AI search optimization → umbrella term
• AEO and GEO → two overlapping names for getting into AI answers
• LLM visibility → the result you measure
• AIO → another broad label with no settled definition

AEO describes the practice of making content easier for AI to understand, cite, and recommend in generated answers. This means optimizing content for AI systems’ answers (i.e., SEO for AI search), not traditional search rankings.

What mentions, citations, and recommendations actually mean

In traditional search, visibility means your page appears in the results; a click means someone visits your site from that result. 

Being mentioned, cited, or recommended by AI isn’t the same thing, and the difference matters:

• Mentioned: Your brand is part of the conversation.
• Cited: The AI used your content as a source.
• Recommended: The AI suggests your brand as an option for what someone’s looking for.

It’s worth noting that simply showing up in an AI-generated answer isn’t the same as being the option someone ultimately chooses. 

A mention can build awareness, a citation can send someone to your site, and a recommendation can influence what they consider next. Each one tells you something different about how your brand is showing up.

For a beginner-friendly walkthrough, try our free Master SEO and AIO course.

Where AI answers get their information

AI tools don’t all cite the same sources, and the mix varies depending on the question, industry, and tool.

Broadly speaking, citations come from three places:

1. Company websites: Product pages, blog posts, guides, and documentation. This is good news for smaller brands: your own useful, specific content can be cited directly. Large cross-platform studies find company-operated websites are the biggest source category overall.
   
2. Independent sources: Reviews, comparison articles, news sites, and industry publications. These give AI tools authoritative information about your brand that doesn’t come directly from you.
   
3. Communities and social platforms: Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, forums, and other places where people discuss products and brands. These can matter, but which ones matter most changes significantly by topic and AI tool.

It’s also worth resisting the urge to chase this month’s citation winner. Reddit became a popular target for AI search strategies, only for its share of visible ChatGPT Search citations to drop by about 86% in a single week. The drop happened around the same time ChatGPT changed how it searched the web.

The lesson isn’t to avoid Reddit. It’s not to build your AEO strategy around any one platform’s current citation share. Start with useful content you own, then build a genuine presence in the places your audience already trusts.

Where smaller brands can win in AI search

Bigger brands may have an edge in AI search because they’re already talked about across more of the web, not necessarily because they publish more or better content than everyone else.

That existing footprint can give bigger brands a head start. But it doesn’t mean smaller brands are locked out.

Smaller businesses and creators are often closer to the people they actually serve. You know the specific questions your customers ask, the trade-offs they weigh, and the details a generic answer from a household name tends to miss.

That firsthand knowledge can make a focused, specific answer more useful than something broad from a brand everyone’s heard of. Take your customer’s FAQs and address them head-on with highly targeted content. 

You don’t need to outpublish a bigger brand. You need to publish the clearest, most useful answer in the space you already know best and give other people good reasons to talk about it.

One question, several decisions

A person might type one question into an AI search tool, but the answer they actually need often depends on several smaller ones.

Take someone asking, “What’s the best website builder for a small bakery?” They’re not just asking about website builders. The AI is also weighing hosting reliability, ecommerce features, pricing, ease of use, and online ordering before it combines all of that into a single answer.

Google calls its version of this query fan-out: AI Mode and AI Overviews can run several related searches behind the scenes and stitch the results into a single response. It’s a useful example of how the process works, not a rule that every AI tool follows the same method.

Google’s query fan-out video shows this process in action:

That matters because a page that only answers the headline question can miss the details people actually need to act on. Answer the main question clearly, then cover the follow-ups that naturally come next — you don’t need to chase down every possible sub-question to be useful.

Those same follow-up questions are useful for content planning, too. Our guide to building an endless stream of content ideas with WordPress and Claude shows one way to work through them.

How AEO compares to SEO

The biggest difference between AEO and SEO comes down to what you’re actually optimizing for. 

Traditional SEO focuses on earning clicks from search results. AEO cares about earning mentions and citations in AI-generated answers — so a click isn’t the only outcome that counts anymore. In that sense, AEO builds on SEO instead of replacing it. 

The same practices that help people and search engines understand your content also help AI systems cite and recommend it. 

Google’s own guidance supports this: established SEO fundamentals still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode – no separate playbook required.

If you’re looking for practical ways to structure your content for AI search, our AI search optimization guide covers the essentials in step-by-step detail.

How to tell if AEO is working

AEO measurement looks different from traditional SEO because there’s a new layer of visibility to track.

Dedicated AI visibility tools like OtterlyAI can show whether your brand is being mentioned or cited across answer engines. That tells you whether you’re showing up in the answer itself.

Traffic tools answer the next question. WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics can show when those appearances turn into visits to your site and what people do after they arrive.

A no-budget way to track your AEO visibility

However, you don’t need an enterprise tool to start checking whether your AEO work is having an effect.

A spreadsheet and a few repeatable questions can give you a useful baseline. Treat this as a pulse check, not a ranking report.

1. Ask the questions your customers ask
   Pick five to ten questions that matter to your business and run the same prompts through tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Mode. Note whether your brand appears, whether your site is cited, and which competitors show up instead. Look at what those cited sources offer that yours doesn’t.
   
2. Ask AI about your brand directly
   Does it describe your business accurately? Does it associate you with the products, services, or topics you want to be known for? If the answer is vague, outdated, or inconsistent across tools, that can point to gaps in how clearly your brand is represented online.
   
3. Track the same prompts over time
   Record the prompt, platform, date, mentions, and citations in a simple spreadsheet, then check again monthly. If you publish something specifically aimed at one of those questions, record the result before publishing and compare it again later.

Taken together, these signals give you a clearer picture: Are you showing up? Are people clicking through? And is that traffic doing anything useful once it gets there?

AEO is still developing, so the exact metrics and tools will continue to change. Our AI Tools archive rounds up our latest coverage in one place, including our guide to AI discovery and a plain-English look at what’s new in WordPress 7.0’s AI infrastructure.

Prepare your website for AI search with WordPress.com

Most of what people are calling AEO right now is just being clear enough that a machine can quote you. It’s an evolution of good SEO and good writing, not an entirely new discipline.

The fundamentals haven’t changed: create helpful content, structure it clearly, and build credibility both on and beyond your own site. Those habits will continue to put your content in the best position to be discovered. 

If you’re ready to put that into practice, follow these 9 steps to prepare your WordPress site for AI search engines.

New stores on the WordPress.com Commerce plan start on Purple, a store-first theme built by WooCommerce. 

The shop page, product pages, the cart, and checkout are already there, designed to work together. 

Your first decision is what to sell.

Pages built to work together

Purple ships with a complete set of store templates: shop, category, single product, cart, and checkout, all sharing the same template parts and the same pattern library.

Your product page and your checkout look like they belong to the same store, because they were designed as one system, not assembled piece by piece.

Say you have 20 products ready to list. On Purple, that is not a design project. It is just adding inventory.

A checkout you can actually edit

Checkout is where you lose people. A confusing layout, a field that feels unnecessary, a form that does not match the rest of your store. Friction at that step costs sales.

On Purple, checkout is built from blocks, just like the rest of your site. Most themes don’t ship with a block checkout. Purple does. 

Open it in the Site Editor and change what you need to: the layout, the labels, the fields. Add a reassurance line before the payment step. Remove a field you do not need. It works like any other page.

A theme is one part of a store

You open a store on Purple and the infrastructure is already handled. Hosting, your domain name (free for the first year), SSL, and payment processing come with the Commerce plan. 

WooPayments is available for merchants in 38 countries; once set up, you can accept payment from customers anywhere in the world. 

There are no WordPress.com transaction fees on your sales, though payment-processing fees still apply. Your store includes analytics and SEO tools — no plugins to install. WordPress.com handles theme updates for you.

The design is yours to move. Colors, typography, spacing, headers, footers, page layouts, and templates are all editable through the WordPress.com Site Editor. Purple ships with a set of style presets. Change the whole look without rebuilding a single page. 

When the store is already built, you can spend more time on your products and customers.

Start your store with Purple

Start a new store on the WordPress.com Commerce plan with Purple’s shop, product, cart, and checkout designs in place. Add your products and make the storefront your own.

Already selling on the Commerce plan? Explore Purple in the Theme Showcase.

Questions about Purple? Reach out to our support team. We’re here to help.

But then the little costs start to creep in: the AI subscription you rely on, a stock-image license, a better microphone, or other creative tools that help turn an idea into a post. And you think: It’d be nice if this thing paid for itself.

This is about cultivating and sustaining your passion without turning it into a side hustle, a personal brand, or an influencer job.

Decide what “enough” looks like

Before you choose a way to monetize your website, decide what you’d like it to cover right now. Maybe that’s a yearly domain name renewal, a premium WordPress theme, or the plugin you rely on. 

It doesn’t have to be a life-changing number, and it doesn’t have to be the end of the story either.

Check the invoices for the expenses that help you publish – your professional email, storage and backups, or a favorite creative tool – for the actual figures. Think of it as a useful first milestone, not a cap: a tip jar might take care of your next renewal; an affiliate link or small download may cover more. 

If that gets you to “enough,” great. If it makes you curious to do more, you can always see where it goes.

How to monetize your site 

There’s more than one way to make your site pay for itself. 

Start with the exchange that already makes sense for your readers: a tip jar lets them say thanks; an affiliate link points them to something useful; a payment button gives them a resource they’ve asked for. Paid newsletters and sponsored posts can come later, when you want to offer more.

The options below start small and gradually ask a bit more of you. Pick one that fits your blog as it is, not the business you’re supposed to build.

A donation or a tips button

A donation form or tips button lets readers who already like what you do support it directly. If your readers leave thoughtful comments, email to say thanks, or share your posts with friends, it may be all you need.

Some people will tip; some won’t. Either way, it doesn’t hurt to have it there for readers who want to support your work. 

On WordPress.com, the Donations Form block (available on Premium, Business, and Commerce plans) lets you collect one-time or recurring tips, and you can set your own suggested amounts. You can also show a form directly on the page, or set it to appear as a pop-up button instead. 

There’s also a preconfigured tips button labeled “Buy me a coffee” that you can customize. That gives you an even simpler place to start.

Affiliate links

Affiliate links let you earn a small commission from recommendations you’re already making. If you already mention books, gear, or tools you genuinely use in your posts, you can use them as a simple way to offset your site’s costs.

Say you run a book blog and you’re the friend everyone asks for a beach read. Each month, you recommend three or four you’ve really enjoyed. That’s where an affiliate link fits naturally.

Join the company’s affiliate program and add the link to your post. You’ll earn a commission every time someone buys through it. No WordPress.com setup required, just the link itself.

But remember that the recommendation should come first, and readers should always know when a link earns you a commission. A blog built around chasing commissions feels very different from one that only adds affiliate links to things it would recommend anyway, and readers can tell the difference.

Used this way, affiliate links ask very little of you. You don’t need to change your site’s design or ask readers to do anything new. You also don’t need one in every post; sometimes there simply isn’t anything worth recommending.

If this helps pay for the books, research subscriptions, and reference material behind your recommendations, it might already be enough.

A payment button

A payment button lets you sell one thing readers keep asking for — no store required. Maybe it’s a printable seed-starting calendar, a zine of your favorite hiking routes, or a downloadable checklist you’ve already shared a dozen times.

The Payments block works much like the Donations Form block, except it’s for selling something instead of collecting tips. For a digital download, you don’t need a shopping cart or a full online store.

Add the button to any page or post, connect Stripe, and set your price.

It can be the only thing you ever sell. And if it pays for the software, stock images, fonts, music licenses, or design tools that make your work possible, you’re done.

A paid newsletter

This one’s a bigger step than a tip jar, so it only belongs on your list if you already have regular readers who keep asking for more.

Say you’ve written a monthly gardening blog for years. Most readers are happy with your public posts. But a handful keep asking for planting calendars, seasonal reminders, or behind-the-scenes notes by email. That’s the point where a paid newsletter starts to make sense.

WordPress.com already lets readers subscribe to get your posts by email. You can add an optional paid tier for readers asking for more: exclusive posts, early access, and bonus content.

You can also customize what new subscribers see when they sign up, like a welcome message and a clear description of what the paid newsletter includes.

But for plenty of sites, a donation button and the occasional affiliate link cover the yearly costs. A commitment to a paid newsletter isn’t always necessary.

An occasional sponsored post

Sometimes the opportunity comes to you instead. A company whose products you already use might ask you to write about them. That’s another way to help your site pay for itself. 

With sponsored posts, the same rule applies as with affiliate links: only work with brands you’d mention anyway, and always be upfront with readers when a post is sponsored.

You don’t need to chase brand deals or build a sponsorship pipeline. If one or two sponsored posts each year help pay for a camera, recording equipment, or a piece of specialist gear, that’s all you need. It shouldn’t be the bulk of what you publish.

Your blog, audience, and earnings on WordPress.com

Give yourself five minutes today to decide which first step fits your blog as it is. You don’t need a 15-point business plan to take it.

Pick the smallest step that already makes sense: a tips button, an affiliate link to one recommendation you’ve already made, or a price on the download readers keep asking for. 

If it covers the next renewal, great. If it opens up something you want to build on, you can choose that later.

Paid newsletters, sponsored posts, memberships, and online stores are there if you decide you want more.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! Much of the engineering effort these past two weeks went into some meaningful rollouts: our AI website builder flow got an upgrade and there’s a new VideoPress player.

Create a custom theme with AI

Our AI website builder for creating new sites just got more capable. On Premium and Business plans, it now generates a fully custom theme built around your goals and brand.

Once it’s built, we’ve streamlined the AI Editor, where you can keep refining the design by chatting with the WordPress Agent, so you always have support and can get your site exactly as you want. A helpful new feature is called Annotate, which allows you to send multiple targeted edits to the agent at one time:

A refreshed video player

There’s a redesigned VideoPress player available with some powerful new features for sites on Business and Commerce plans. As a reminder, VideoPress is a lightweight and responsive video player you can use to host and embed videos on your WordPress.com website.

The update is built around a cleaner control bar with chapter markers and scrub-preview thumbnails built into the seek bar, an easier way to share a video (with separate handling for private ones), and an end screen that offers options to replay, share, or download once a video finishes. The sharing and downloading is in your control as always.

Fixes and improvements

We also:

• Improved messaging when canceling a Google Workspace subscription, so it’s clear exactly when access ends. (Github PR) 
• Replaced the dead-end empty cart when a domain can’t be renewed with a clear explanation and a one-click way to search for a new domain. (Github PR) 
• Cleaned up the WordPress Agent’s command menu in Telegram. (Github PR) 
• Restored the missing Search menu item for Jetpack Search on impacted sites. (GitHub PR)
• Refreshed the design of the password reset page for a clearer, more guided flow. (GitHub PR)
• Added a “Retired” badge so you can tell at a glance when a theme in your site’s theme list is no longer receiving updates. (Github PR)

Twenty-five years on, we still hold that memory close, and we think about the families everywhere who carry that loss every single day, not just today.

What strikes me every year is how many people turn to writing to process something this big. Grief doesn’t always fit into a conversation. Sometimes it needs a page.

That’s something our community does beautifully. Across WordPress.com, people all over the world have spent years building spaces to remember: personal reflections on where they were that morning, deep dives into the history of the memorials built afterward, quiet tributes to the small moments that don’t make the history books.

A couple from our own community:

The World Will Never Forget 9/11 is exactly what it sounds like, an entire blog dedicated to keeping the memory of that day alive, from the Memorial Plaza to the stories behind it.

Ephemeral New York has spent years documenting the small, personal memorials tucked into corners of the city, the ones you’d walk past without noticing unless someone pointed them out.

This is exactly why WordPress.com exists. From day one, our mission has been to give everyone, everywhere, a place to share their voice, whatever that voice needs to say. Sometimes that’s a recipe blog or a small business finding its first customers. Sometimes it’s someone working through the hardest thing that ever happened to their city, their family, or their country, one post at a time. We built this platform to hold it all, and we always will.

This is what community looks like to me. Not one big monument, but thousands of small ones, kept alive by people everywhere who decided their corner of the internet was worth using to remember.

To everyone who lost someone that day, and everyone who’s lost someone since to illnesses tied to that day: we’re thinking of you. To the first responders and regular people who ran toward danger instead of away from it: thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

But that doesn’t mean organic traffic is dead. It simply means it comes from multiple smaller streams rather than a single large source.

If you’re a small business owner, freelancer, or creator trying to grow your site, this guide covers practical ways to attract visitors through search, AI visibility, newsletters, partnerships, and personal branding.

Step 1: Create content to answer real customer questions

Answering real audience questions clearly helps customers understand what you offer. 

It can also give search engines and AI tools a useful page to consider when someone asks a related question — but no format guarantees a citation.

You can find out what questions your audience is asking online through:

• Keyword research: Type your keyword into Google and check the “People also ask” section and autocomplete suggestions.
• Customer support and sales: Mine your support inbox and sales calls for recurring questions, or ask your customers directly.
• Social media listening: Monitor your brand mentions and important keywords in social networks. Browse relevant niche communities on Reddit, Quora, or Facebook.
• Competitor research: Check what questions your competitor’s content answers and look at reviews on G2, Trustpilot, or Google.
• Product reviews: Read online reviews of your own products to find what questions customers had before buying them.

Next, answer customer queries in your content, for example:

• Dedicated website landing pages (“Is [product] worth it?”)
• Blog posts (how-to posts, comparisons, etc.)
• Headings inside your content
• FAQ sections and pages (use the Accordion block to create them)
• Infographics
• Case studies

When you do create this content, get to the answer quickly. Start each section with a short explanation, then expand on the details below it. 

That’s good for readers first, and it also makes the page easier for search and AI tools to interpret.

WordPress.com users can use the integrated AI Assistant to help tighten long paragraphs, clarify answers, or add FAQs — right inside the WordPress editor.

Step 2: Build landing pages for high-intent searches

When someone is close to requesting a quote, booking a call, or buying from you, they should land on a page built for that decision – not a generic blog post.

That might be a service page for a specific audience, location, or problem. Comparisons and “best for” posts can support those landing pages by helping people narrow down their options.

These specific, high-intent pages are easier to rank for than broad topics and often convert better. 

What can those landing pages look like in practice?

• Highly specific service pages → “SEO Audit Services for German E-Commerce Stores”
• Comparisons narrowed to a target group → “MailChimp vs Kit for Bloggers”
• Targeted best-of list posts → “Best [product] for [specific audience]”
• Location-based variations, if relevant → “Best Coworking Spaces in Munich for Freelancers”

Here are two examples of targeted blog posts that show up in Google for “vegetarian meal prep for college students.”

This content strategy also helps appear in AI searches. According to Ahrefs, “best XYZ” blog lists make up 43.8% of all page types cited in ChatGPT responses, with 35% of those lists coming from low-authority domains.

Case in point: One of the websites from our previous example is also recommended by ChatGPT.

Additional growth tips:

• Use Table blocks for side-by-side comparisons.
• Be honest and thorough in your blog posts, not just self-promotional.
• Link prominently (e.g. from your homepage) to your niche pages to boost their authority and help visitors discover relevant information.
• Keep layouts clean and scannable by using well-designed block themes and reader-friendly formatting.

The AI Assistant can help here as well, for example, by brainstorming targeted content ideas.

Step 3: Turn one content piece into multiple traffic sources

With traffic more fragmented, new sites rarely grow from search alone. 

Get more out of the content you’re already creating by feeding several traffic channels with each piece.

Here’s what that process may look like:

1. Publish a focused blog post.
2. Send it to your newsletter subscribers (see step 4).
3. Share three short insights from it on LinkedIn or turn key points into a Bluesky thread with a link back to the full post.
4. Post it to one relevant niche community (e.g., Reddit threads, Facebook Groups, or Slack channels). Note that many of these communities frown upon overt self-promotion.
5. Use the article as a basis for a video or podcast episode — even if it’s just a two-minute screen recording.
6. Add internal links to and from older posts to keep traffic circulating.

Below is an example of me repurposing one of my own articles.

One article, then one newsletter send, three LinkedIn posts, and one community contribution — same core idea, different ways for people to find it.

To speed things up, you can use the MCP Claude Connector to give Claude access to the content of your WordPress.com site. It can then automatically generate social media snippets from existing posts or recommend niche communities to share them in.

Step 4: Use newsletters to attract visitors

A newsletter can bring visitors back to your site without hoping a search engine or social algorithm puts you in front of them. These are people who have already asked to hear from you.

The hard part is not sending the email – it’s giving people a reason to open it: something useful, timely, or interesting enough that they want to come back to your site.

An email list doesn’t just allow you to share your latest post, but also to send special offers, weekly updates, or behind-the-scenes information. It helps you encourage repeat business and learn more about your audience.

To use newsletters effectively:

• Publish your newsletters publicly as web pages to provide examples and attract organic traffic.
• Promote newsletter topics on social media to establish your expertise and drive more subscribers.
• Link back to your service pages or blog posts — the goal is to get people on your website after all.
• Place sign-up forms in your blog posts, your about page, and everywhere else people see it, not just the footer.

Need an example? Marketing Examined shows how a newsletter can grow into a broader media business. It’s a reminder that email can become a traffic source of its own — not just a place to announce your latest post.

On WordPress.com, you can put Subscribe blocks where readers will actually see them, email new posts to subscribers, and offer paid subscriptions when it makes sense.

Step 5: Build partnerships that send referral traffic

Partnering with others in your industry can be another source of traffic.
Establishing win-win relationships helps you gain visibility with existing audiences and attract highly targeted traffic.

Find potential partners by looking for businesses who share your audience but aren’t direct competitors. One way to do that is by contributing to communities your target customers are already a part of. 

Use your expertise and initiative to provide value and build genuine relationships with leaders and influencers in the space.

Partnering can take many different forms:

• Write guest posts for complementary businesses.
• Co-host webinars and publish recap pages on your site.
• Appear on each other’s podcasts.
• Exchange expert quotes and link to each other’s resources.
• Collaborate on research and create co-branded assets.
• Create dedicated landing pages for collaborations or events.
• Cross-promote each other on social media.

An example of such a partnership is the one between speed testing tool GTmetrix and WordPress performance plugin WP Rocket. The two businesses have been recommending each other on their respective websites for years.

Step 6: Grow your personal visibility alongside your site

In 2026, people often discover businesses through individuals first. People trust other people more than logos, so building a personal brand as a business owner can increase your company’s visibility and drive website traffic.

Tips for expanding and using your personal visibility:

• Consistently share practical, targeted insights: Use platforms where your audience hangs out, e.g. LinkedIn for B2B, TikTok/Instagram for visual industries.
• Show your personality and process: Post about what you and your team (if there is one) are learning, testing, or even failing at.
• Link strategically: Tie insights back to deeper resources on your site (e.g., “For the full guide, check out [link]”).
• Optimize your About page: Include specific results (“Helped 50+ clients increase traffic by 30%”) and social proof (testimonials, media features).
• Make authorship easy to verify: Use a named author, a short bio, and a linked About page so readers can see who is behind the advice and why they should listen.
• Keep branding consistent: Use the same name, photo, and bio across all platforms so people recognize you instantly.

Find additional tips in our post on how to build an online presence.

Step 7: Make your site easy to trust and reference

A fast, secure, easy-to-navigate site is more likely to hold onto the visitors you worked to bring in.

Before you chase another traffic source, check whether a new visitor can quickly work out what you do, who you help, and what to do next.

Start with a rock-solid technical setup that makes your website easy to understand and reference:

• Clean and descriptive URLs
• A logical site hierarchy and permalink structure
• Dedicated, linkable pages
• Trust signals via a clear About and Contact page
• A list of all your pages in an XML sitemap
• Additional information through schema markup

Using the block editor, you can create well-structured content with descriptive headings and relevance signals, such as image alt text.

The AI Assistant comes in handy here, too. It can help clean up unclear sections, tighten long pages, check grammar, and propose page titles. It’s also able to generate images, edit and add alt text to existing visuals, as well as adjust layouts, styles, and patterns.

Step 8: Treat AI search tools as decision influencers

AI tools shape buying decisions even when they don’t send a direct click. That’s why your brand needs to be referenced in them. 

It’s worth checking what they say about your brand, but you can’t control every answer. Clear, accurate information on your site gives them one solid source to work from.

Steps you can take to guide the conversation:

• Add concise summaries to your service pages.
• Include precise, consistent descriptions for your products.
• Answer specific questions your customers may ask AI to be cited in answers (see step 1).
• Clearly state who you help, what you do, and where you operate.
• Add pages that list your solutions for key customer types.
• Structure your content well so it’s easy to summarize.

AI mentions also rely on external platforms. Monitor how people discuss your brand on Reddit, reviews they write, etc. Try to get featured on trustworthy sites, such as well-known publications, industry directories, and industry authorities (see step 5).

Bonus tip: Track your mentions by searching your brand name directly in different AI LLMs. See how they describe you, whether they mention you at all, and what sources they cite when they do. Think of this as a rough visibility check, not AI’s version of rank tracking. Results can change depending on the prompt, the tool, and the day.

Continue to grow your website audience

Website traffic is less likely to come from one big breakthrough now. More often, it grows through a mix of useful answers, focused pages, distribution, newsletters, partnerships, and a site people can trust.

The important part is consistency. Pick two or three tactics from this list and stick with them long enough to learn what works. You can always expand later.

Our free one-hour Grow Your Website’s Audience course covers the practical side: getting found through search and social media, turning visitors into subscribers, promoting your work, and reading your site stats.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog. Today, we’re talking about a new way to manage your sites, working on them with ChatGPT, and a new version of WordPress.

The Hosting Dashboard for your site management needs

Switching between sites you manage used to mean reopening the same menus, re-finding the same settings, every time.

The Hosting Dashboard now keeps a persistent sidebar and top bar in place as you move between your sites, so domains, hosting details, updates, and performance stats are always easily accessible, no matter how many sites you manage.

Learn more in our announcement blog post.

Manage your site from ChatGPT

You can now connect ChatGPT (alongside Claude and other MCP-compatible AI agents) directly to your WordPress.com site. 

Ask your ChatGPT to draft posts, categorize your posts, moderate comments, help with SEO, fix missing alt text, and more, all through a conversation. Nothing is published or changed without your go-ahead.

MCP access is included in paid plans, and free sites can try it for the first 30 days after the site is created.

Learn more in our ChatGPT support doc, and try the plugin today:

WordPress 7.1 has arrived

WordPress 7.1, the latest version of the WordPress software, shipped on August 19, and your WordPress.com site is already running on it. That’s the deal with hosting your site on WordPress.com: you get the newest, most secure version of WordPress without lifting a finger.

Two features worth knowing about:

1. You can now share a link to a specific revision of a post, so a collaborator or client can review its history without you having to walk them through every change.
2. When one post on your site links to another, WordPress 7.1 now approves that notification automatically, so your moderation queue stays focused on comments that need your attention.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped a handful of fixes and improvements over these last few weeks:

• There’s now extra protection against unauthorized changes to your account email address, and our password reset flow is now even stronger.
• Check out your WordPress Agent settings page to see how you can set up site management via Slack. (GitHub PR)
• Backup restores now warn you up front if restoring could trigger charges for WooCommerce Subscriptions renewals. (GitHub PR)
• Staging sites are now hidden from your main sites list by default — a new filter lets you show them again. (GitHub PR)
• Each track in your Playlist block now has its own toolbar for more control and customization. (GitHub PR)
• The Reader’s groups are now called Shelves, each with its own color and icon in the sidebar. (GitHub PR)

At first glance, the Arizona desert seems simple, barren. But look closer, and there is an elegance in that simplicity that is art in and of itself. 

Like good technology, everything has a purpose, nothing is wasted, and there is beauty in that. At WCUS this year that I saw art and technology converge.

A four-day family reunion 

WordCamp US 2026 ran August 16–19 at the Phoenix Convention Center. Over 1,100 people registered, with thousands more watching the livestreams. There were over fifty sessions across four tracks. Contributor Day drew 425 participants — 29 of them contributing for the first time — who organized into 26 teams around goals they could achieve in a day.

So why make the trip when the talks are livestreamed, recorded, and recapped?

On the walk to the event hall, I asked Anne McCarthy the same question (yes, we braved the heat!). She nailed it: it’s a family reunion. In the age of screens, AI, and video-meeting culture, people are not only craving human connection but also their chosen family. 

Others who believe in WordPress and what open source represents. Like-minded creators and builders making things that matter now, and hopefully for years to come.

WordPress 101 Workshop: Build a Website

I sat in on Jamie Marsland’s beginner session to build side by side with other WordPress users and see the customer experience with fresh eyes. 

We started from a blank page. And there’s something genuinely exciting about stripping everything away and going back to the basics.

After we’d built a few pages and posts, Jamie showed us the Cover block (his favorite). Watching him use it felt more like designing than building.

On the topic of teaching and learning, the WordPress 101 session felt complementary to the WordPress.com Student Plan we launched at WCUS. Students get to learn on a real WordPress site, not a temporary classroom project, and the work they create can stay with them after the course ends. Learn by making something real, then keep building on it.

Jamie’s enthusiasm for WordPress is contagious; in fact, halfway through his session, a pigeon flew into the room and settled in. It came for the air conditioning, stayed for the demo.

Sessions geared toward creativity, simplicity, and customer centricity

In line with the art and technology theme, WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped during WordCamp – a release named after the pioneering jazz artist, packed with new styling tools, updated media flows, added notes functionality, and more. 

The opening keynote, Dreaming with AI: Innovation Lessons from the Front Lines of Disney & Meta, was delivered by Loyal Pyczynski. His perspective: AI can help teams build products that are more useful and more distinctly human, but only if you bring creators, developers, researchers, and communities in early, let real experimentation drive decisions instead of assumptions, and keep human judgment at the center.

And his test for whether you’ve done your job? User attention. If the thing you’ve made is good enough, people won’t get distracted — they’ll look up and realize time has gone by and they want to keep going.

Nearly half of the sessions were AI-focused or AI-adjacent, the biggest showing at a flagship WordCamp to date. The program covered agentic development, AI-powered plugin pipelines, vibe coding for non-technical users, block themes and AI in agency workflows, WordPress readiness for the agentic web, and more.  

The closing session with Matt Mullenweg and Robert Jacobi brought it back to simplicity. WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, pulled out his camera and snapped pictures of the audience, saying he’s bringing back @photomatt – a playful nod to the handle he uses on Tumblr and X. During the fireside, he also spoke to the need for technology to get simpler. Over time we have a tendency to make things more complicated, but wisdom brings us back to simplicity. Matt’s stories and tech references are laced with poetic references that tie back to technology.

Which brought me back to the desert. Nothing wasted, everything with a purpose — perhaps the hardest thing to build and the last thing you arrive at.

WordPress Studio shines

At the WordPress.com booth, our agentic local development tool, WordPress Studio, drew people into longer-than-planned demos, with attendees gathering around the screens to watch sites being built and changed in real time.

Right alongside it, WordPress Agent showed another side of the same idea: AI that doesn’t just advise you, but can actually make changes to your site for you. We also demoed Guidelines, which gives the Agent a shared memory of your site’s voice, goals, and visual direction.

What interested me was how quickly the conversation moved past the demo itself. People were already imagining these tools inside the way they actually build, manage, and update WordPress sites.

WCUS played to our humanity

The tactical experiences, the emphasis on play, the prioritization of creators, and the endless photo opportunities are all part of what made this conference uniquely human.

It’s a tech conference, after all, but I was absolutely delighted by the way it transcended digital sameness and AI-driven standardization to stand out and speak to our humanity.

Here are examples in action:

• Code for the People private screening with stickers and swag
• Paint your own Wapuu – tactile, emotional, brilliant 
• Booth giveaways that were Arizona-centric: water bottles, fans, sunscreen, along with bags and bandanas designed by local artists 
• The WordPress Mercantile featured local businesses built on WordPress
• A focus on play, including a seating area with cornhole, an in-booth air hockey table, and multiple photo ops with delightfully creative backgrounds
• A creator studio staged with couches, plants, perfect lighting, and high end recording equipment designed specifically for generating great video. Free SD cards for those who utilized it 

Even the Wi-Fi password was a nod to the convergence of technology and art…IYKYK.

As I climbed into my Waymo and headed to the airport, I reflected on how art connects people. It inspires people. It can also polarize — and that’s not a bad thing. 

As businesses and as humans, we don’t have to be everything to everyone. We just have to find our people (like our WordPress community). Be uniquely you. 

Find your customers, focus on them, and use technology to help you fuel that connection.

With this new Studio desktop experience, you can describe what you want to the expert WordPress agent, watch it come together in a live preview, point at anything that’s off, and ship it to production when it’s ready, all in one window.

You’re left with a full WordPress build you own and can maintain, not throwaway code.

Today, it’s available in beta for everyone to try.

How to access the beta and what to expect

You can try this new desktop UI in just four steps:

1. Download the WordPress Studio desktop app on macOS, Windows, or Linux
2. Sign in with your WordPress.com account
3. Enable the New Studio Experience option under Studio → Beta Features
4. Add a payment method on file to verify you’re a real account (you won’t be charged)

And if you’re a brand-new Studio user — welcome! You’ll see the new agentic UI as default, so there’s no need to opt into the beta.

The Studio interface has been reimagined to focus on agentic development, with three panels next to each other in a single window:

• Your Sites on the left
• A chat with Studio Code in the middle
• A live preview of your site on the right

Switch on the new UI without losing a thing

If you’re an existing Studio user, you won’t lose your current sites when you switch the new experience on; every local site from the old experience carries over automatically. Nothing to migrate, re-import, or rebuild.

Pick a site to jump back into it, start or stop it, or open its settings.

Chat with Studio Code to make it happen

The agent in the middle panel is Studio Code, our coding agent built for WordPress that knows blocks, themes, and WP-CLI natively.

In fact, this is what WordPress developer Olivier Gobet said about his experience building with Studio Code:

I’ve been building WordPress sites for almost 20 years, and Studio Code has genuinely changed the way I work. For the first time in a long while, I feel like I’m no longer limited by the technical barriers of implementation. Instead of asking myself, Is this possible?, I can focus on, What do I want to build?

You describe what you want in plain language, and Studio Code builds it on a real local WordPress install where you can build, vibe, and experiment. Chat history is stored so you can easily stop and restart a work in progress, and you can always spin up a new chat for each site when you want to start fresh:

If you want to give Studio Code standing instructions it follows on every task, set them under Settings → AI.

That same screen is where you can also toggle agentic features off entirely if you’d rather build WordPress the classic way.

Watch it build in real time

Changes render live in the in-app preview as Studio Code works. You see the site take shape with every ask, so there’s no switching between browser and UI to check whether an edit landed.

It’s a working preview of your local site, too: click any link to move to other pages, just as a visitor would, and watch them update as Studio Code makes changes. You can even access the admin dashboard to manage posts, pages, products, and everything else you’re used to.

One of your favorite tools is still available, too, just in a different spot. Use the Annotate button to send specific, targeted requests to Studio Code.

Click the elements you want changed, stack up your notes, submit them with one click, and Studio Code makes every edit in one pass. It’s the client-feedback loop, built into the tool, and it’s a natural fit for your workflow of reviewing, marking up, and revising a site fast.

Build locally, ship when you’re ready

The core functionality of Studio remains too: you’re able to spin up a real, local WordPress site in seconds by clicking the + button in the toolbar.

Because everything you build happens locally, you can try things, break things, and start over with zero risk to a live site. Nothing goes live until you say so.

When it’s ready, you ship to fast, managed hosting on a paid WordPress.com or Pressable plan in a few clicks with Studio Sync.

What you build in Studio is real WordPress: portable, dependable and yours to maintain.

Meet the new WordPress Studio

Give the new Studio desktop beta a real workout. Point it at an actual project, a brief, some images, a vibe, and see how far it gets, where it shines, and where it falls short.

During this beta period, you’ll get a one-time credit gift from us to try it out. Once you hit your limit, top-ups are available for just $10.

And we want to know how it goes. Open a GitHub issue with your feedback, bug reports, and ideas. Your input shapes what comes next.

Set it up once, then talk to your site to publish posts, moderate comments, check traffic, update media, and handle the small jobs that start after the writing ends.

After you add the plugin, type @WordPress.com in any chat and hand off those chores to ChatGPT.

Publish your words without the busywork

You wrote the post, maybe in your notes app, maybe in a doc, maybe in a voice note. Getting it live on your blog can be time-consuming, but with the ChatGPT plugin, you just need to ask. 

Try running some of these prompts directly in ChatGPT:

• @WordPress.com here’s my draft. Can you clean up the formatting and make a draft for me on my site?
• @WordPress.com schedule my recent draft to go out on Monday.
• @WordPress.com can you add a featured image of a hand holding a pencil in the style of a black and white editorial vintage illustration with visible stipple and crosshatch texture.
• @WordPress.com review my draft and suggest links to related posts already on my blog. 

Your content stays yours, and ChatGPT helps with the formatting, scheduling, and the clicking around. 

Run your site by asking

Once connected, ChatGPT can read your stats, your comments, your media library, and your site’s activity log, so questions about your site get answered where you asked them.

Here are a few prompts you can use:

• @WordPress.com how did my traffic this month compare to last month?
• @WordPress.com show me the comments actually worth replying to, and clear out the spam
• @WordPress.com find images missing alt text and help me update them
• @WordPress.com what changed on my site in the last two weeks?
• @WordPress.com trash any post that’s been sitting in draft for over a year

Alt text deserves a special mention here. It’s the accessibility task everyone means to do and almost nobody does, because doing it means setting the alt text one image at a time.

Now you can set alt text through a conversation with ChatGPT, and your readers who use screen readers get a better experience for it.

Change your site, conversationally

The plugin can make changes across your site, from adding pages and updating site settings to working with your existing design.

Try prompts like:

• @WordPress.com add a page for my workshop schedule, I attached a draft here.
• @WordPress.com my site is still in coming soon mode. Can you make it public?

You stay in control

The WordPress.com ChatGPT plugin is optional and off by default. When it’s enabled, ChatGPT has to ask you before making changes to your site.

If it’s about to publish or edit content, launch your site, change settings, or delete something, you’ll see what it plans to do before anything changes.

New posts and pages start as drafts by default, and for anything that publishes, edits, launches, or trashes something, ChatGPT describes exactly what it’s about to do and waits for your confirmation. 

Connect your site to ChatGPT

Getting started only takes a few steps and after that, WordPress.com is available whenever you type @WordPress.com in ChatGPT.

First, you’ll need to enable MCP access on your WordPress.com account. This enables AI agents like ChatGPT to use the WordPress.com tools you choose to enable.

Then, open WordPress.com in ChatGPT, select “Install plugin,” sign in with your WordPress.com account, and approve the connection. Then type @WordPress.com and hand off the first chore.

The full setup guide is in our support docs, and if you’d rather connect Claude or another AI assistant, that works too.

MCP access is included with every paid WordPress.com plan, and Free sites also get this during the first 30 days after creation.

Your writing stays yours, and now you can work with your site without having to go to it. Writing was always the fun part anyway.