AVIF, HEIC and In-Browser Compression Landed in Core
WordPress 7.1 moved image compression into the browser and added AVIF, HEIC and HDR gain map support. What changes for uploads, delivery and file size.
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Prompt Injection Is an SEO Surface Now
Agents now read your pages and act on them. That makes your comments, reviews and user profiles an input to someone else’s assistant, and a moderation problem.
Preferred Sources and the New Search Profile Badge
Google documented an embeddable preferred sources button on 20 August 2026 and a Search profile badge on 16 September. Two different things, two different jobs.
WordPress.org Now Auto-Blocks Risky Plugin Releases
Every WordPress.org plugin release passes a six-hour security cooldown, and since 9 September 2026 a high-risk score halts distribution with no human in the loop.
OAI-AdsBot Is Crawling You for Ad Placement
OpenAI documents four crawlers, and one of them exists to judge ad landing pages. What each does, which ignores robots.txt, and how to verify rather than guess.
No Core Update Since May: Reading Unconfirmed Volatility
Google’s most recent core update started 21 May 2026 and ran 11 days 21 hours. Nothing since. Here is how to triage ranking movement with no update to blame.
The Abilities API: What Core Gave Plugin Authors
The Abilities API shipped in WordPress 7.0 and was extended in 7.1. What a registered ability is, what it replaces, and what it demonstrably does not do yet.
You Can Finally Measure AI Search. Sort Of.
Since 31 August 2026 every site gets AI impressions in Search Console: one metric, four dimensions, no clicks, no position. What that supports, and what it cannot.
JSON-LD Unescaping: One Pass, and Why Markup Breaks
Googlebot now runs one pass of HTML unescaping over JSON-LD and stops. Here is where double escaping comes from and why the fix is not in your schema.
Sudo Mode and a Secrets API Are Coming in 7.2
The WordPress 7.2 roadmap, published 18 September 2026, names sudo mode, a Secrets API and Application Passwords hardening for an early December release.