The digital advertising landscape is experiencing a foundational shift. OpenAI has officially transitioned its conversational AI advertising from a quiet pilot into a fully-fledged media channel. With a self-serve Ads Manager, cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, and advanced tracking pixels now live, conversational marketing is moving from an experimental tool into a core acquisition strategy. For forward-thinking brands, understanding how to navigate this new ecosystem is no longer optional.

Understanding the Conversational Ad Engine

Unlike traditional search engines that rely heavily on keyword bidding, ChatGPT ads are triggered by contextual relevance and user intent within a live chat session. Sponsored cards appear cleanly beneath the AI’s organic response, ensuring that the ad does not compromise the core user experience. This means brands are purchasing premium proximity to highly engaged, intent-rich decision moments. Furthermore, if users opt into personalisation, the system can safely leverage previous chat history and session memory to match the most relevant ad to the consumer.

Strict Guardrails and Product Catalogue Demands

OpenAI has established non-negotiable parameters around data privacy and brand safety. Advertisers never receive raw chat logs, names, or precise locations; instead, performance is delivered via non-identifying aggregate data. Additionally, ads are strictly prohibited in sensitive verticals like healthcare, politics, and financial services. For e-commerce retailers utilising the new automated product feed ads, entry requires a rigorous compliance check. Brands must submit a flawless 100-product sample feed evaluated for data completeness and high creative standards before their full catalogue is accepted.

Preparing Your Brand for AI-First Marketing

To capitalise on this rolling expansion, marketing teams must optimise their assets for conversational environments rather than keyword density. Ad copy should adopt a calm, confident register that echoes the natural phrasing of user queries. Because the system utilises session memory, establishing a strong organic presence through Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is vital. Ensuring your brand is consistently cited in early research stages will organically compound your relevance when the ad auction triggers later in the buyer’s journey.

Everyone’s currently talking about the advantages of AI, how it can be a useful tool to improve workflow, making tasks that would have taken months take days, tasks that would have taken days take hours, but many people aren’t focusing on what tasks we should not be using AI to automate. In a world of automation, the human touch is now more important than ever.

Keyword Research

This one seems like it doesn’t make sense. Surely using AI for keyword research is great, right? Well, yes to a certain extent. AI can be incredibly useful for going through your site and picking out key topics, keyword groups and helping you create a framework for your keyword research, while making sure there are no gaps in your keyword strategy.

However, when you’re looking at which keywords to focus on to build out content, this is where it gets a little bit more tricky. For example, for a business that sells a service or product, you understand which keywords are going to generate more revenue and how they have intrinsically more value to your business than some other keywords that may have more search volume and a lower CPC that AI is telling you to focus on. Make sure you use AI to optimise but don’t let it dictate your keyword strategy. You need to take into account factors such as conversion and revenue when making these decisions.

Client Reporting

Similar to keyword research, of course we aren’t saying AI isn’t helpful at all when reporting to clients, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. AI can be used to help you create your physical report incorporating data, giving suggestions on different slides and angles you can tie into your reporting, helping you formulate talking points. All good stuff. But something AI can’t replace is client communication.

A lot of digital marketing is highly specialised and can get confusing quickly for clients who aren’t familiar with it. One of the skills of a marketer is to be able to convey these complex concepts to their clients in a presentable and succinct manner so that they can understand the value of your contribution and how important it is to their business.

By all means use AI to help you build out your client reports, but clients need interaction in order to be able to digest and understand a lot of the data that they’re seeing, and at the minute that’s still where the human element comes in.

Content Writing

This is one of the biggies. Over 50% of newly published articles and nearly 75% of newly created web pages now include AI-generated content. The problem that businesses face when doing this is they lose their brand voice and identity, but also, AI is being fed content from the internet to train and learn. Which means unless people are using AI to inform their content deliberately and writing it themselves, then the content becomes generic and regurgitated, offering nothing new. This is exactly the type of content Google hates. It wants content that is fresh, original and gives a unique perspective and voice on a topic from an authoritative figure in the space; this is what you should be aiming for. Too much AI Slop on the internet is a problem for Google, and they are penalising people who are using it in the wrong way.

Making sure you know when and how to use AI is crucial to building a successful website. If you’re using AI incorrectly, your site can be penalised by Google and negatively affect your rankings, but use it correctly, and your site will benefit from a boost in workflow productivity and efficiency.

Nostalgia marketing is a key tactic used to tap into emotional and resonant memories from the past. When used effectively, it can bring feelings of joy or contentment; this familiarity that’s established helps to reinforce trust and authority.

What Can Make Nostalgia Marketing So Effective?

Creating feelings of nostalgia is a technique which taps into culture, emotion, identity, social connection and even moments of escapism. By creating a moment for viewers to reminisce, brands are able to effectively make the audience engage, which can help with their effort to strengthen emotional bonds and influence purchasing decisions.

Utilising nostalgic elements is particularly effective for prompting emotional engagement; it often helps brands stand out in oversaturated markets. People are more likely to engage with and invest in something which creates this kind of response.

When a campaign is able to successfully connect to existing memories, the recall of messaging, helping to forge trust. Rather than the viewer creating a new association, it is associated with memories consumers already have.

Familiarity often prompts people to discuss the past, which encourages viewers to share and engage with campaigns. This not only helps improve reach, but it also improves brand awareness and recognition. This type of engagement helps create social proof. Consumers engaging with it in this sense implicitly signal that it’s worth paying attention to.

When Doesn’t Nostalgia Marketing Work?

Whilst it can be powerful, this tactic isn’t automatically effective. This can happen when the nostalgic element overwhelms the messaging, isn’t aligned with the offering, or lacks relevance to the audience. For instance, what may be nostalgic for a millennial may not land at all for a Gen Z consumer.

The most common causes for nostalgia-based campaigns not working include:

• When the campaign feels forced
• Seeming inauthentic
• It conflicts with the brand’s position
• The nostalgia factor overshadows the product
• People’s unique experiences and responses
• Potentially overused or tired product campaigns

Key Examples of Successful Nostalgia-Based Marketing Campaigns

Some key examples of when it’s been done right include Argos’ “toys” campaign. McDonald’s adult Happy Meal product campaigns, along with Cadbury’s 200-year celebration of the brand.

‘There’s more to Argos than toys’

Argos’ latest campaign draws on nostalgia through clever visual references. Using everyday items like fridges and sofas in bold packaging reminiscent of children’s toy boxes, the campaign reminds people that Argos is more than just a place to buy toys.

For readers who grew up in the generation of catalogues, the throwback to getting toys from Argos is a fond memory. I too grew up circling the ideal toys for my Christmas list, so seeing this campaign puts a clever spin on how brands grow alongside their audience.

The campaign cleverly reminds passers-by that Argos stocks far more than what’s in the toy box, reinforcing the message that “there’s more to Argos”.

Cadbury’s Celebrated 200 Years of Business

Arguably, one of the best campaigns for its nostalgia factor was Cadbury’s 200-year celebration, which saw packaging revamped or, more fittingly, pulled back in time through the revival of its historic designs.

The TV advert produced alongside the campaign perfectly matches the nostalgic feel. It sets the scene at the advent of the Dairy Milk bar before transitioning into a present-day setting, showing that whilst times may have changed, consumer buying habits and emotional connections to the brand remain the same.

McDonald’s Adult Happy Meals

Whilst McDonald’s hasn’t explicitly marketed its adult meals as “Adult Happy Meals”, many of us who grew up pleading with our parents for a Happy Meal will recognise the same sense of excitement through its recent promotional releases.

Initially, it was the Grinch collaboration that sparked excitement. Customers could order a Grinch meal, featuring adult-sized products accompanied by a free pair of socks. This was then followed by the Friends x McDonald’s collaboration, where consumers were able to collect one of six figurines of the characters. Now, the excitement continues with the announcement of a new cup release for the FIFA World Cup.

The latest “Adult Happy Meal” taps directly into 2000s nostalgia through the return of the collectable Coca-Cola glasses, something that seemed to exist in every British household.

The campaign is particularly effective because it taps into the positive emotions attached to nostalgic purchasing experiences, reminding consumers of the excitement and familiarity associated with childhood treats and collectables.

Nostalgia is most effective when it supports a brand’s message rather than replacing it. While nostalgic campaigns can build emotional connections, trust, and engagement, they can fail when they feel inauthentic, target the wrong audience, or rely so heavily on the past that consumers lose sight of the product itself. The most successful campaigns use nostalgia as a bridge between meaningful memories and a compelling modern brand story.

If you run paid search campaigns, this week just got urgent. Google has begun deleting hourly, daily, and weekly reporting data older than 37 months, with the policy taking effect from 1 June 2026. This is what needs to be done over the coming days.

What’s Actually Changing and What Isn’t

It’s easy to panic, so let’s be precise. Granular reporting data, including hourly, daily, and weekly figures, will now only be retained for 37 months, while monthly, quarterly, and annual data remains accessible for 11 years. Once data passes its retention window, it will no longer be accessible through the Google Ads interface or APIs – meaning your dashboards, automated reports, and data warehouse pipelines could all be affected. If your agency holds years of campaign history for benchmarking or client reviews, that granular layer is now gone unless you already exported it.

Why This Hits Agencies the Hardest

For those of us managing multiple client accounts, the operational risk here is significant. Organisations running complex omnichannel reporting by blending data from multiple Google APIs need to audit their extraction workflows carefully to avoid serving clients incomplete performance dashboards. Think about seasonal trend analysis, day-of-week performance benchmarking, or long-term A/B test comparisons; all that granular intelligence becomes inaccessible without proactive data management.

Three Actions to Take This Week

Don’t wait for a client to ask why their historical chart has gaps. First, export all hourly, daily, and weekly data beyond 37 months immediately. Second, review any automated reporting workflows to confirm whether they store historical data independently or only query Google Ads on demand. The latter will now fail silently. Third, consider moving to a third-party data warehouse solution to ensure long-term retention sits outside Google’s control entirely.

Astro is not a content management system like WordPress, Wix or Shopify; however, it could be the new alternative. A content management system is defined by the ability of its users to create, manage, store and publish content. Astro doesn’t offer these features in the traditional sense, but it is a modern web framework that allows users to build fast, static HTML websites. This basically means that your website is created using code rather than a content management system; however, Astro lets you reuse layouts, components and templates to minimise the code and build large, fast websites that are optimised for SEO.

Where is WordPress faltering?

Why would you want to look for an alternative to WordPress, you may be wondering? While WordPress is the largest CMS on the market with some impressive features, including an extensive plug-in library and a large community, it also has its drawbacks as well. WordPress has a built-in editor and a theme that all come with their own code, but devs often install alternative themes or page builders to improve page build efficiency in WordPress. All these features can lead to page bloat as code is coming from the editor, the theme and the page builder, slowing down sites and negatively impacting SEO. 

How can Astro solve WordPress issues?

For issues with code bloat and site speed, Astro is dramatically better than WordPress. Astro will not only remove any of the additional page bloat issues that accompany WordPress, but you can also create reusable components to speed up your build process, known as islands. These islands allow users to save sections of code to re-use, which Astro will then take and turn into plain HTML, making the build much faster. This process helps devs to create a site that is SEO friendly, excelling in speed and core web vitals, which are both ranking factors for SEO. Below is a snapshot of some of the key features of Astro. Some other features include server-first rendering, which once again helps speed up sites for the end user and more

Where is Astro still behind WordPress?

The advantage WordPress still has over a platform like Astro, and it is a big one, is accessibility and ease of use for the masses. While for developers, Astro may be easy to use and update content, for non-technical editors or teams with lots of publishers without a background in development, it does not allow these users the flexibility to go in and edit the content.

There is a fix for the issue with Astro; however, it is compatible with a headless CMS. This basically means your code is integrated into a CMS that doesn’t have its own code and allows your publishers an admin panel to edit content.

Astro has both advantages and disadvantages of WordPress, but for users who are seriously thinking about alternatives to WordPress to improve site speed on a bloated site, Astro is a really important alternative to consider.

The way social media and websites perform is evolving, and customer journeys are no longer linear. This shift requires businesses to adapt, whether that means reallocating marketing budgets or adjusting their visual approach to better align with customer expectations.

What is the marketing funnel?

The marketing funnel describes the varying levels of commitment an audience has to your product or service. Often described as a funnel, as the top lets in lots of people, whilst the process naturally eliminates uninterested or ill-fitting prospects, eventually with a smaller output of people who convert.

How does the marketing funnel inform marketing strategies?

A solid marketing strategy will account for the customers at the various stages of the funnel, producing content and campaigns that cater to each stage of the funnel. Understanding the different stages of engagement better allows the messaging and imagery to be tailored, with the aim of converting them.

The type of content produced for the top of the funnel, for instance, would differ significantly from that created for the bottom of the funnel. Depending on the stage of the funnel the customers are at, the goal will change, and therefore the strategy to achieve the conversion will need to be differentiated.

Measuring engagement for each stage of the marketing funnel

At the top of the funnel, the kind of metrics you’ll need to pay attention to are the reach and click-through rate. These metrics alone will help give you a sense of the interest generated, with the reach being the overall figure, and the click-through rate indicating interest.

As customers advance to the middle of the funnel, metrics that will begin to play a key role in your strategising, these include:

• Average duration
• Drop-off points
• Data captured information (the volume compared to reach)
• Cost per lead
• Engagement rate

The middle of the funnel is where the “make it or break it” moment happens; it shows the clear strengths and challenges. It’s perhaps the most insightful because it allows businesses to distinguish exactly what customers do and do not respond to.

At the bottom of the funnel is where all the work you have done in terms of strategy is either validated or highlights greater pain points. Metrics you’ll need to track for this stage of the funnel range from conversion rates and retention to the customer’s lifetime value.

To calculate your customer lifetime value, you’ll need to multiply the average purchase value by the purchase frequency and the predicted customer lifespan.

Retention is just as crucial as acquisition, as it indicates just how much of the audience wants to engage, an indicator of strong growth. Personalisation is a non-negotiable; in fact, it’s a determining feature in why some customers stay. A better understanding of the interplay of these will allow brands to connect with customers on a profound level.

Is advertising during a sports game an effective way to spend ad budget?

You may be wondering whether investing in advertising during the World Cup is the right move for your business. The answer depends on several factors. Are your business and product offering suitable for this type of exposure? Do you have the budget and resources to secure ad space, whether pitch-side, online, or during broadcast ad breaks?

These are the key questions businesses must consider when evaluating the practicality of World Cup advertising. For established brands, the risks are relatively low compared to those faced by SMEs.

Take major brands such as PepsiCo. They can launch high-impact campaigns with less risk because their brand is already widely recognised, and they typically have larger budgets to produce memorable, visually impressive advertising. Smaller brands, however, face a greater challenge. If their campaigns fail to stand out, they can easily fade into the background amongst the noise of global competition.

What are the regulations around advertising for FIFA games?

Advertising during FIFA events is subject to several regulations and broadcasting standards, including:

·         Gambling and alcohol advertisements cannot appear in areas affiliated with under-18 audiences, such as junior club sections or youth kits.

·         Campaigns must not imply official endorsement or representation of clubs without authorisation.

·         Foods and beverages high in fat, sugar, or salt cannot be promoted before the 9 pm watershed.

·         Ofcom regulates television advertising time, with commercial breaks generally limited to around 12 minutes per hour.

Does the placement of ads matter during the World Cup?

Placement is critical, regardless of the advertising format. Whether ads appear on websites, pitch-side banners, social media feeds, or during half-time breaks, placement directly impacts visibility and audience engagement.

Effective placement increases the likelihood of capturing viewers’ attention, improving brand recall, and ultimately generating a stronger return on investment (ROI).

Securing ad campaigns during sporting events

The strategy brands choose during the World Cup can significantly influence campaign performance.

For smaller brands, lower-risk strategies such as paid social and browser advertising are often more practical. These channels allow businesses to target audiences affordably without directly competing for premium placements against globally recognised brands.

Brands looking to expand their paid advertising strategy may invest in options such as newspaper takeovers, allowing them to dominate a publication’s homepage or digital front page for a set period.

Larger brands, meanwhile, often pursue premium placements such as pitch-side advertising, sponsorship deals, or impression-based broadcast packages. Sponsorships, in particular, are highly effective during major sporting events, helping to create strong associations between a brand, its products, and global competitions such as the FIFA World Cup.

Ultimately, successful World Cup advertising comes down to strategy, placement, and audience relevance. While global brands may dominate the biggest spaces, smaller businesses can still achieve strong results through targeted, well-positioned campaigns that align with both their budget and objectives.

Google Analytics has added a new AI assistant which lets you track traffic that comes from multiple different chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Google will now label traffic sources from different chatbots. This allows users to see which Chatbots they are performing well with and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Why this is important for Marketers

Chatbot traffic has grown exponentially in the last few years, although it still only accounts for around 3% of search engine traffic. This is still a huge number of people, regularly exceeding 5 billion searches monthly, and with many users now using it as their primary source of information online. For website owners, it is extremely important to understand how and why your traffic is coming to you, so you can maximise the potential traffic down the line.

For example, if your site were an information-based site, many users now use AI Overviews, ChatGPT, etc. for informational-based searches, 70% of users now use AI, while some search types, such as E-Commerce, still rely heavily on advertising and users entering websites as opposed to AI. For this information-based site, you would want to make sure you are structuring your content in a way that makes it visible for search engines to use your information. While the conversion rate is lower on AI tools compared to traditional search, being seen in Chatbots may still often lead to people coming to your website and converting.

What users should track in GA4?

Now that AI Assistant traffic is available in GA, there are a number of different ways you can track AI traffic in relation to your site. These help you to understand what content performs best on AI inside AI tools.

Different metrics to track include:

• Conversion rate from AI traffic – Making sure that your traffic is converting well is a priority. If the traffic coming from AI searches is low-quality, then you want to adjust your strategy for how you’re appearing in AI to target more high-value customers.

• Average Engagement Time – Related to the last point, once again linked to low-value traffic, if the traffic you’re receiving from AI is not engaging with your content for long periods of time, you want to try and adjust your strategy to target different kinds of traffic that offer more value

• Landing Pages from AI traffic – This is important because you can see which pages on your site are already performing well in AI and which ones aren’t. This allows you to analyse your content and draw conclusions on what types of content are working well in AI, helping you adjust future content plans to scale your site.

Tips for Improving AI Conversion

While making sure you know what content performs well in AI is important, and you are on top of tracking all the right data, knowing how to adjust your content to improve it for AI performance is also important. Here are a few quick tips to make sure your content is AI-ready. Ask yourself these questions. Does your content:

• Clearly answer specific questions
• Use concise headings and subheadings
• Includes factual and well-structured information
• Demonstrates expertise and authority
• Uses schema markup and clear hierarchies

These GA4 analytics metrics are a step forward for users in being able to understand and analyse their AI traffic, helping to stay on top of the ever-evolving industry and making the most of users’ changing search query habits.

As marketing experts, we constantly preach the importance of meeting your audience where they are. Right now, that “where” is undeniably short-form vertical video. Fresh data reveals a massive shift in Meta’s ecosystem: half of all ads globally on Instagram are now running on Reels.

If you are still allocating the majority of your paid social budget to traditional static feed placements, you are missing the cultural and behavioural shift happening right in front of your eyes.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The transition to Reels-first advertising isn’t a slow burn; it is an accelerated takeover. Findings show that Reels accounted for 50% of global Instagram ad placements, up from 35% the prior year. In the U.S. market specifically, Reels secured 46% of the entire ad inventory. This trend isn’t isolated to Instagram either; Facebook Reels saw 29% of its global ad inventory shift to the short-form video format.

Why Meta is Going All-In on Reels

This surge in ad inventory is no accident. Meta has intentionally reoriented its platforms around Reels, algorithmic recommendations, and direct messaging. According to Meta’s internal data, video watch time is up 20% year-over-year, and Reels now command more than half of the total time users spend on Instagram. By testing layouts that replace the traditional home tab with a dedicated Reels view, Meta is training users to consume content vertically and continuously.

What This Means for Your Marketing Budget

While short-form video traditionally yields lower immediate monetisation rates than classic feed ads, it is the ultimate engine for user retention. Instagram’s daily active users grew by 2% alongside this Reels boom.

To bridge the gap, Meta has rolled out advanced, AI-driven ad tools like “trending ads” to help brands seamlessly curate culturally relevant creative. As marketers, our mandate for the upcoming quarters is clear: stop treating Reels as an optional add-on campaign extension. It is time to treat vertical, narrative-driven video as the foundation of your social ad strategy.

WordPress 7.0 launched 20 May 2026. Named after jazz musician Louis Armstrong, it is the most significant structural update the platform has shipped since the block editor arrived in 2018. For businesses running WordPress sites – which accounts for the vast majority of websites we build and manage – it is worth understanding what has actually changed, what it means in practice, and why the AI integration in particular is more consequential than it might initially appear.

The headline feature that was widely anticipated, real-time collaborative editing, was quietly removed from the release on 8 May after race conditions and server memory failures made it unsafe to ship at scale. That is the bad news. The good news is that what did ship is arguably more important for most businesses: a native AI infrastructure layer built directly into WordPress core, a rebuilt admin interface, and meaningful improvements to editorial workflow.

What WordPress 7.0 actually shipped

WordPress 7.0 formally marks the beginning of Phase 3 of the Gutenberg roadmap, which the core team has described as the Collaboration phase. The real-time editing delay means that the most visible collaboration feature will not arrive until a future release, but the underlying infrastructure work is substantial.

The key changes that shipped are:

• The WP AI Client and Abilities API. A native, provider-agnostic AI layer built into WordPress core. It connects directly to OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude without requiring separate plugin integrations for each.
• A rebuilt admin interface. The first major visual overhaul of the WordPress dashboard since 2013, driven by a new React-based system called DataViews. It brings the backend closer in feel to modern tools like Notion and Airtable.
• Client-side media processing. Image resizing and compression now happens in the browser using WebAssembly, reducing server load and speeding up media handling.
• Improved revision history and editorial tools. The revision system has been significantly updated, making it easier to track, compare and restore previous versions of content.
• PHP 7.4 minimum requirement. Any site running PHP 7.2 or 7.3 that upgrades to WordPress 7.0 will be on an unsupported configuration. If you are unsure which PHP version your site runs on, check with your hosting provider before updating.

Why the AI layer is the most important thing in this release

The WP AI Client and Abilities API deserve more attention than they have received in most of the coverage so far. Until now, AI integration in WordPress has been fragmented: different plugins connecting to different AI providers in different ways, with no standardised approach to authentication, rate limiting or content handling. Every developer building an AI-powered WordPress feature had to solve the same infrastructure problems independently.

WordPress 7.0 changes that. The Abilities API provides a standardised layer that handles authentication, rate limiting, content sanitisation and context management centrally. Plugin developers can now register their plugin’s capabilities so that AI assistants can recognise and use them. Rather than each plugin managing its own AI connection, everything routes through the same core infrastructure with admin approval required before any plugin can use stored AI credentials.

In practical terms, this means AI features in WordPress are about to become significantly more coherent and trustworthy. Instead of a patchwork of third-party solutions with varying quality, reliability and security, the platform now has a single, well-architected layer that plugins can build on. The immediate use cases include content generation assistance, automated alt text for images, SEO optimisation suggestions and workflow automation. The longer-term possibilities, as more plugins adopt the Abilities API, are considerably broader.

Why this matters for your website specifically

The timing of this release is worth noting in the context of the wider changes happening in search. We have written recently about why websites now need to work for AI agents as well as human readers, and the tools available to help businesses monitor and improve their AI search visibility. WordPress 7.0’s AI layer is the platform-level infrastructure that makes it possible to act on those recommendations directly within your CMS, rather than through external tools bolted on afterwards.

For businesses in content-heavy sectors, the improvement to editorial workflows is also meaningful. The revised revision system and better content management tools reduce the friction in maintaining large libraries of treatment pages, service descriptions or course content – exactly the kind of content that AI search systems are trying to parse and cite accurately. Cleaner workflows produce better-maintained content, which produces better AI visibility outcomes.

The admin redesign, while it will take some getting used to, is long overdue. For any client or team member who manages their own WordPress backend, the move toward a more modern interface reduces the learning curve and the number of support requests that agencies like ours receive about basic navigation.

What to be cautious about

WordPress 7.0 is a major release, and major releases carry risks that point updates do not. There are a few things worth being careful about before updating.

• Check your PHP version. PHP 7.4 is now the minimum. If you are on an older version, contact your hosting provider before touching the WordPress update.
• Test plugins and themes before updating. The admin rebuild and the new DataViews system may cause compatibility issues with plugins that rely on the old admin interface. Test on a staging environment first, not on your live site.
• Do not rush the AI features. The Abilities API requires admin approval before any plugin can use stored AI credentials. Take time to understand which plugins you are granting AI access to and why. The framework is sound, but the decisions around which tools to enable are yours to make.
• Real-time collaboration is not here yet. If you were planning to restructure your editorial workflow around simultaneous editing in WordPress, that feature has been deferred and is unlikely to arrive before 2027.

The bigger picture

WordPress powers around 43% of all websites on the internet. The decision to build a native, standardised AI layer into core is not a minor product update. It is a signal that the platform intends to be a serious player in the AI-assisted web, rather than ceding that ground to newer tools. For the tens of millions of businesses running WordPress, that is a meaningful commitment. For agencies building and managing those sites, it represents a significant expansion of what is possible within the platform most clients are already on. We will be looking closely at how the AI tooling ecosystem evolves to take advantage of the Abilities API over the coming months, and will keep you updated as the picture becomes clearer.

In the meantime, if your site runs on WordPress and you have not already done so, now is a good time to check your PHP version, review your plugin stack, and make sure your staging environment is up to date. The update itself is worth making, but it is worth making carefully.