A practical guide on how to publish AI content to WordPress

Scaling content on WordPress with AI is a powerful strategy. With WordPress powering over 43% of the web, it’s an ideal platform for brand building. AI provides the engine to increase publishing velocity significantly.

However, while generating text is straightforward, the process of formatting, adding media, and optimizing for SEO can be time-consuming. This involves manual formatting, sourcing visuals, adding SEO details, and ensuring a polished final post.

You can tackle this with copy-pasting, various plugins, or complex automation recipes. Each path has its own considerations. Integrated tools like the eesel AI blog writer are designed to streamline this process, turning a keyword into a publish-ready draft.

What is AI content for WordPress?

When we talk about AI content for WordPress, we don't just mean a wall of text spat out by a prompt. We're talking about complete articles, landing pages, and product descriptions built specifically for the platform. This means content that's already structured for the WordPress block editor, with all the headings, lists, and formatting that make a post easy for people to read and scan.

It's a huge lever for your marketing growth. Here’s why:

• Scale and consistency: You can finally put writer's block to rest. A regular publishing schedule helps you build authority with search engines and gives your audience a reason to keep coming back.
• Keyword targeting: Have a long list of long-tail keywords you want to rank for? AI makes it realistic to create high-quality content for all of them, something that would take forever to do by hand.
• Team efficiency: Instead of getting bogged down in the manual grind of writing and formatting, your team can focus on higher-level work like strategy, promotion, and analyzing what's actually resonating with your audience.

The goal isn't just to produce words. It’s to publish high-quality, fully optimized content that ranks on Google and provides real value. That means you need a workflow that includes SEO and visuals from the start, not as a messy afterthought.

Three common methods for publishing AI content to WordPress

Getting AI-generated content onto your WordPress site can be done in a few different ways. The path you choose will have a big impact on your speed, costs, and the quality of the final post. Let's look at the three most common methods people are using right now.

Method 1: The manual copy-paste workflow

This is where everyone starts. You generate text in a tool like ChatGPT or Jasper, then copy and paste it into the WordPress editor. Sounds simple, but that’s where the manual work begins. You have to manually add all your H2s and H3s, bold key phrases, create bullet points, and then manually search for images and videos.

Pros:

• It’s completely straightforward. No setup is needed, and you’re using tools you already know.
• You have total manual control over every single element of the post.

Limitations and Cons:

• Time-consuming: The AI might write the text in five minutes, but the "last mile" of formatting, finding and uploading images, sourcing a relevant YouTube video, and adding internal links can take a significant amount of time.
• The asset gap: Most AI text generators focus on producing text, leaving the user to source visuals, from the featured image to in-post graphics and tables, separately.
• SEO is an afterthought: The raw text from most AI writers isn't optimized for search. You have to go back in and manually fix the heading structure, place your keywords correctly, and write meta descriptions, usually with another plugin like Yoast or AIOSEO.
• Requires significant editing: The initial text may need substantial edits to align with a brand's voice and tone.

I'm trying to keep up on AI as best as I can. For building? No. In the time it takes to endless prompt AI for specially what I'm trying to create, I can create is in half the time. AI websites do not take into account client specifications. We do use it for images, graphics and text (although we modify the text for a human touch.)

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Method 2: Using WordPress AI plugins

The next step for many is to try a plugin. The WordPress plugin ecosystem has over 60,000 free plugins, and many now include AI features. These WordPress AI plugins work right inside your WordPress dashboard. You install the plugin, connect it to an AI service, and generate content that gets saved as a draft. Examples include dedicated AI writers like GetGenie or all-in-one SEO suites like All in One SEO that have added content generators.

Pros:

• It keeps your entire content process inside the WordPress environment, which is handy.
• Some plugins can automatically create a draft for you, saving you the copy-paste step.

For us it's a real game-changer for theme development, but required quite some preparation of theme structure, workflow etc. Using Cursor + Cline/RooCode for AI with gutenberg + ACF blocks + Tailwind. Using Sonnet 4 to generate all templates, field definitions etc. Managed to speed up the development 2-3x

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Limitations and Cons:

• API key management: A potential challenge is API key management. Most of these plugins require you to get and manage your own API keys from places like OpenAI. According to the AI Image Generator plugin's documentation, this involves setting up an account and dealing with pay-as-you-go billing, which can be a technical step and may lead to variable costs.
• Incomplete posts: Many plugins focus primarily on text generation, meaning they may not create a complete post with all necessary assets like infographics, tables, or relevant video embeds. You’re still sourcing most of that yourself.
• Feature fragmentation: This approach can lead to feature fragmentation, requiring multiple plugins to assemble a single blog post. For example, a tool like Imajinn might create artistic images, but it doesn't write any text.

Method 3: Using automation platforms

For the more technically savvy, there are automation platforms like Zapier and Make. These tools let you connect different apps to create automated workflows. A common setup might be: you add a blog topic to a Google Sheet, which triggers OpenAI to write an article, which is then sent to WordPress as a new draft.

Pros:

• They're incredibly powerful and can be customized for really complex, multi-step automations.

Limitations and Cons:

• High technical complexity: This method generally requires more technical expertise to set up and maintain. It requires building multi-step "Zaps" or "Scenarios" and understanding how different application APIs talk to each other.
• Potentially fragile workflows: The automation can be sensitive to changes. If one service in the chain has an outage or its API changes, the entire workflow can be disrupted, leaving you to figure out what went wrong.
• Accumulated costs: Costs can add up, as this method often requires paying for multiple subscriptions: one for the automation platform (Zapier), another for the AI model (OpenAI), and potentially others.

That's the biggest downside to RooCode/Cline/etc.: you provide your own API keys and pay for credits to individual services, so it can add up quickly.

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The integrated workflow: Using a dedicated AI content platform

An alternative to the methods above is an integrated platform that handles the entire process from keyword to a publish-ready post. The modern solution is an integrated platform like the eesel AI blog writer that handles the entire process, from keyword to a publish-ready post, all in one place. It is designed to address the challenges of manual assembly and asset sourcing found in other workflows.

• Ends manual assembly: Instead of giving you a plain block of text, eesel AI generates a complete, structured blog post. It handles the formatting, heading structure, and optimization for you. You get to review a finished product instead of building one from scratch.
• Includes a full asset package: Every article comes with a full suite of AI-generated assets, like custom images, infographics, and data tables. It even makes your content more engaging by embedding relevant YouTube videos and pulling real Reddit quotes to add social proof.
• SEO and AEO built-in: The platform is designed to help you rank. It optimizes the content for your target keyword from the start and structures it for AI Answer Engines (AEO), getting you ready for the future of search.
• Brand-aware content: Generic AI tools need a ton of editing to get the tone right. With the eesel AI blog writer, you just provide your website URL. It automatically learns your brand context to make sure the content and any product mentions sound natural and authentic.

This is the same tool we used to grow our blog from 700 to 750,000 daily impressions in just three months by publishing over 1,000 optimized posts.

The workflow is as simple as it gets:

1. Enter your topic or target keyword.
2. Provide your website URL for automatic brand context.
3. Generate the post. eesel AI does the research, writing, and asset creation, delivering a complete draft that's ready for a final once-over.

   

From content assembly to strategic publishing

Many methods for publishing AI content to WordPress involve a significant assembly process. Users often find themselves getting text, images, and videos from different sources and spending valuable time piecing them together.

The future of efficient content creation lies in integrated platforms that handle the entire workflow. This shifts the focus from manual production tasks to higher-level work like strategy and editing.

For a visual guide on how these automated workflows can look in practice, the following video demonstrates how an AI agent can take content from a simple input and publish it directly to a WordPress site, handling much of the heavy lifting.

A video tutorial explaining how to publish AI content to WordPress automatically.

Ready to see what a truly streamlined workflow feels like?

Ready to go from keyword to complete draft in one click? Generate your first blog post for free with the eesel AI blog writer and get a publish-ready article in minutes.