WordPress spent the week building official plumbing for AI agents, while a customs deadline hit UK sellers and Elementor made deep cuts to chase the same AI wave. Gutenberg also shipped a useful editor update. Here’s what changed and what to do about it.

AI: WordPress opens a front door for AI agents

WordPress core wants to make AI access official. A new merge proposal for WordPress 7.1 adds three read-only “abilities” that let AI agents like Claude or ChatGPT pull your site’s settings, content, and user data directly, all behind the same permission checks your dashboard already enforces. Nothing becomes visible to an agent that a logged-in admin couldn’t already see.

That direction matches what’s already shipping outside of core. Vibe AI, the free MCP plugin from SeedProd we covered this week, lets any MCP-compatible AI edit posts, fix SEO, and rebuild themes by chat, with destructive actions gated behind an approval step. The new WordPress 7.1 abilities give plugins like this a standard way to read real site data instead of each one building its own workaround.

Automattic is also investing in the people who’ll build on top of all this. The first cohort of AI Leaders, a workforce-focused AI credential built entirely on WordPress, graduated 40 students in Chicago last week, each with a $1,000 stipend and a portfolio built during the program. Alongside the graduation, Automattic pledged $500 million worth of hosting accounts over the next five years to back open source education.

Commerce: The EU customs exemption is gone

If you ship WooCommerce orders from the UK into the EU, the rules changed on July 1. The EU’s €150 duty-free threshold for low-value parcels is gone, so every commercial shipment now picks up a flat duty per item category plus VAT, even for a single T-shirt.

The bigger risk isn’t the extra cost, it’s rejection. EU customs checks are increasingly automated, and mismatched HS codes, vague invoice descriptions, or a missing UK EORI number now get a shipment turned back rather than waved through with a warning. If you haven’t checked your shipping settings against those three items yet, do it before your next EU order ships.

Block Editor: Gutenberg 23.5 lands

Gutenberg 23.5 shipped July 1 with in-editor image cropping for the Cover block, so you no longer need to edit an image beforehand and re-upload it. The editor canvas is also now resizable to any width, not just the three device presets, making it easier to check how responsive blocks behave at in-between screen sizes.

The release also lets you turn off real-time collaboration per post type instead of site-wide. It requires WordPress 6.9 or later, so update core first if you’re still on an older version.

Business: A shrinking share and a shrinking Elementor

WordPress’s market share slipped to 41.5% of the web, down from a peak of 43.6% in early 2025, according to W3Techs. The decline has been building for over a year and accelerated through the first half of 2026. Founder Matt Mullenweg pinned the drop on years of underinvestment in R&D from the companies that profit most from WordPress, and said the decline has “woken people up.” A 41.5% share is still the largest single slice of the entire web, but the trend line is one the ecosystem can’t ignore.

One contributor to that pressure showed up directly this week. Elementor cut about 100 jobs, roughly 30% of its workforce, in what it calls a voluntary reset toward AI rather than a sign of trouble. The company says the move came from a position of strength, pointing to years of profitability and more than 25 million active installs. CEO Yoni Luksenberg said Elementor “underestimated how fast AI disruption would move,” and the company wants to compete as an AI platform rather than just a page builder. It’s the second round of layoffs in four years, and it follows a similar move at Wix, another Israeli company that cited AI and a weak dollar-to-shekel exchange rate.

The pressure agencies actually feel looks different. A survey of 210 WordPress agencies and freelancers found that 65% name keeping plugins and themes updated across client sites as their single biggest security challenge, and nearly half of agencies managing more than 100 sites still patch them by hand, one at a time. AI has landed everywhere in agency workflows except there: only 16% use it for site monitoring or maintenance, even though automated updates and security are what agencies say they want most from it next.

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