Summary: Automattic built an AI assistant directly into WordPress.com on February 17, 2026, covering editor layouts and styling, copy rewriting and translation, Media Library image generation and editing, and @ai block notes. The feature is included with Business and Commerce plans, is opt-in except for AI-builder sites, and uses Google Gemini’s Nano Banana models for images. Editor support requires a block theme, and the capability is limited to WordPress.com rather than self-hosted WordPress.org.
Automattic’s announcement landed on February 17, 2026: an AI assistant now ships inside WordPress.com. Not a plugin — a capability that lives in the editor and the Media Library. A site owner types an instruction in plain language; the assistant reshapes the layout, reworks the styling, rewrites copy, and produces images on the spot. The company’s framing fits in one line: “This is WordPress, now with intelligence built in.”
What makes this notable is the carrier. WordPress.com’s own pages put the platform’s blog subscribers at more than 124 million, so whatever the platform switches on by default lands in front of an enormous population of small site owners and content teams. AI moving from something you subscribe to on the side to something the platform itself provides rewrites the whole workflow of building and running a site.
The Assistant’s Capabilities
Going by the official announcement and coverage from TechCrunch and heise, the feature set falls into three groups.
Inside the editor: layouts, styles, and patterns answer to conversation — “make this section feel more modern or spacious,” “change my site’s colors to be brighter and bolder.” Ask it for a new page (a contact page, say) or for a testimonials section dropped beneath an existing one, and the changes land on the live site in real time. On the text side it rewrites (make this bio sound more confident), translates sections into other languages, and suggests titles.
Inside the Media Library: a “Generate Image” button shows up, able to create images from scratch or edit ones already there, with aspect ratios and image styles left to you.
Inside block notes: picking up the collaboration feature from WordPress 6.9, typing @ai followed by a request gets you fact-checks with links and citations to external sources, headline ideas, and paragraph-level strengthening — all with the site’s own content as context.
Cost and How to Turn It On
Business and Commerce are the only plans that get the assistant, and there is nothing extra to pay — Ronnie Burt confirmed in the comments that it is “included in the Business and Commerce plans.” It is opt-in: the owner opens site settings and switches on the “AI tools” toggle. Sites built with WordPress.com’s AI website builder arrive with it already enabled. Staff member Tess Needham stressed that it is “entirely optional — it only runs if you enable it.”
Under the Hood: Nano Banana
The image features run on Google Gemini’s Nano Banana line of models — the official post names them “the latest Nano Banana models” — which in effect folds an image-generation service that would otherwise need its own subscription into the plan price. Which model powers the text and design tasks stays undisclosed; Burt offered only a comparison: set against external AI tools like Claude, the built-in assistant “currently does better with design and targeting individual blocks in the editor.”
Where It Stops: Block Themes and No .org
Two constraints bite hard. First, the editor features presuppose a block theme; on a classic theme the assistant never appears in the editor at all, and the Media Library image features are the only part that still works. That makes block-theme migration the real gate on adoption — agencies and freelancers running long-lived client sites on classic themes get nothing in the editor until a migration happens, which is no doubt why Automattic is already teasing tooling for it. Second, this one belongs to WordPress.com: it is not being shipped to self-hosted WordPress.org, where users are pointed to the official WordPress AI Team instead. The post also teases what comes next: bulk-updating old content and helping migrate classic themes to block themes.
Why Builders and Product Teams Should Care
Three takeaways. First, “built into the platform” is displacing the plugin ecosystem as the primary distribution channel for AI features — AI now marks the difference between plans rather than serving as an add-on, and developers who sell AI plugins need to rethink where they sit. It is also a bundling economics story: the Nano Banana image generation alone replaces a separate subscription, which makes the Business and Commerce tiers harder to compare against cheaper hosting on features alone. Second, context is the real moat of a native assistant: it can read your site, your content, and your layout structure — something no external chat tool can match. The scope choice is telling: Automattic wired AI into three surfaces owners already inhabit (editor, media library, block notes) rather than bolting on a chatbot sidebar, and Burt’s comment that the built-in assistant beats external tools on design and per-block edits is an argument that integration depth beats model choice for this job. Third, AI capabilities folding quietly into products people already use is the through-line we pointed to in our opening-of-2026 outlook — WordPress is just the newest, and possibly the widest-reaching, instance of it landing.