ClassifAI Updates Roundup: A More Powerful, Flexible AI Toolkit for WordPress
Jeff Paul on
Over the past year, ClassifAI has introduced major enhancements that make it even more powerful, user-friendly, and flexible for content creators and publishers. From a redesigned setup experience to new AI-powered content tools, these updates focus on making AI more accessible, customizable, and privacy-conscious for publishers, enterprises, and other WordPress power users.
Here’s a roundup of the most notable new features and improvements.
Local & Private AI with Ollama & Other Solutions
ClassifAI now supports Ollama, enabling users to run Large Language Models (LLMs) entirely on their own servers—eliminating external cloud dependencies, reducing costs, and improving data privacy.
Why Private AI Processing Matters
- No API Costs – With a self-hosted model, you’re no longer paying per request, making AI-driven workflows more cost-effective.
- Full Data Privacy – AI models run directly on your infrastructure, ensuring content never leaves your environment. This is particularly valuable for industries with strict compliance requirements.
- More Control – Local models allow for custom tuning, performance optimizations, and unrestricted usage without API rate limits.
With Ollama, WordPress users can generate content, analyze text, and tag media without ever sending data to a third-party AI provider.
New Chrome AI Provider
For those looking for another privacy-first AI solution, ClassifAI now supports Chrome AI as a provider. This runs directly on a user’s computer—rather than a remote server—offering another way to generate text locally without an external API.
While Chrome AI is different from Ollama (which runs on a self-hosted server rather than a local browser instance), both options give users more control over their data and costs.
Enterprise-Grade Cloud Privacy with Azure AI-Hosted OpenAI Models
Finally, for organizations that want the power of OpenAI’s cloud models without sending data to the public OpenAI API, ClassifAI now supports Azure AI-hosted OpenAI models. This allows organizations to run OpenAI-powered features in a controlled, private environment, ensuring that proprietary content stays within their own infrastructure. This is ideal for publishers and enterprises with strict data security policies, offering the power of OpenAI’s language models while keeping content separate from OpenAI’s general pool of training data.
A Smarter, More Intuitive Setup Experience
ClassifAI now features a completely redesigned setup and configuration UI, making it easier than ever to get started. Instead of organizing settings by AI providers, the new UI structures everything around features—letting you quickly enable, configure, and control the AI-powered tools you need.
This update significantly improves usability, making AI more accessible to all users—whether you’re fine-tuning text generation, managing automatic tagging, or integrating AI-driven moderation.
New AI Features for Smarter Content & User Experience
1. AI-Powered Text Resizing
Need to condense or expand content while maintaining clarity and flow? ClassifAI now supports text resizing, making it easy to generate shorter summaries or longer, more detailed explanations of any content. The feature can be configured to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Grok, and Ollama.
2. Smart 404: AI-Powered Page Recovery
A new Smart 404 feature that dynamically suggests related content based on the URL path, using a new WordPress editor block. This helps reduce bounce rates and keep users engaged, rather than losing them to dead-end error pages.
The Smart 404 feature queries and analyzes a large volume of content for relevancy on the fly; to do so performantly, this feature requires Elasticsearch integration with our popular open source ElasticPress plugin. Elasticsearch is commonly available with business-grade hosting from providers like WordPress VIP and WP Engine, can be self hosted, and can be easily integrated with our affordable ElasticPress.io service optimized for WordPress.
3. Key Takeaways: AI-Generated Summaries at a Glance
ClassifAI now includes a Key Takeaways block, designed to automatically generate concise summaries of your content. This feature is perfect for readers who want a quick TL;DR version of an article before diving into the full text. Whether summarizing long-form blog posts, news articles, or in-depth guides, the AI-generated key takeaways provide a fast, structured overview that improves content accessibility and engagement. Editors can also review and refine the generated takeaways before publishing, ensuring that the most important points are highlighted accurately.
4. AI-Driven Comment Moderation
ClassifAI now integrates with OpenAI’s free Moderation API to automatically analyze and moderate comments, helping site owners filter out inappropriate or harmful content without requiring manual intervention.
5. Term Cleanup: Smarter Taxonomy Management
For large websites with extensive taxonomy structures, ClassifAI’s new Term Cleanup feature automatically detects similar terms and suggests merges, making content categorization cleaner and more efficient.
New Customization & Control Features
6. Structured Content Classification Using Existing Taxonomies
ClassifAI now offers the ability to classify content strictly within existing site taxonomies using Embeddings. Instead of generating entirely new tags or categories, this feature analyzes content in context and applies the most relevant existing terms from your site’s structure. This ensures a more consistent and controlled classification system, improving content discoverability without introducing redundant or overly broad terms. It’s particularly useful for large content libraries, where maintaining a well-organized taxonomy is essential for search, filtering, and editorial workflows.
7. Manual AI Classification & Tagging
Rather than relying entirely on automatic AI-generated tags, users can now manually review and select suggested classifications, ensuring greater editorial control. Terms recommended by AI are also more easily recognized with meta data and an “[AI]” prefix in the editor.
8. Enhanced Role & User-Based Permissions
Admins can now set access controls for AI features based on user roles or by individual user, ensuring that only authorized team members can use or modify AI-powered settings, and to support more gradual feature rollouts and experiments. Additionally, individual content creators can opt in or out of features presented in the editor.
9. Prompt Customization from the Admin Dashboard
The new UI allows admins to modify AI prompts directly from the WordPress dashboard, including support for multiple prompt variations per feature.
10. New Developer Hooks & Filters
For developers looking to fine-tune how ClassifAI interacts with AI providers, new filters have been added to allow control over all OpenAI requests.
General Ongoing Optimization & Improvements
ClassifAI continues to evolve with expanded cloud AI provider support, API updates, and feature enhancements to make AI workflows smarter and more efficient.
Expanded Cloud AI Provider Support
ClassifAI now supports Grok (xAI) as a new AI provider, bringing Elon Musk’s xAI-powered LLM into WordPress for text generation.
Beyond Grok, we’ve expanded support across multiple cloud providers, including:
- Gemini (Google AI) – Broader feature compatibility and the latest API updates.
- OpenAI (ChatGPT & DALL·E) – More robust content generation, image tagging, and transcription features, as well as text-to-speech and embeddings support.
- Azure AI – Enhanced functionality for Microsoft AI users.
- Amazon Polly – Natural sounding text to speech.
Each provider now supports more features within ClassifAI, giving users greater flexibility in choosing an AI model that fits their workflow.
Other Key Enhancements
- Faster image transcription & classification.
- Better AI-generated excerpts, including support for the Classic Editor.
- More intuitive admin notifications, including snackbar confirmations when saving settings.
These ongoing refinements ensure that ClassifAI remains at the forefront of AI-powered content creation for WordPress.
Upgrade to the Latest Version
To download ClassifAI and start using these new features, visit the ClassifAI website.
If you have feedback or feature requests, we’d love to hear from you! Join the discussion or contribute at our GitHub repository.