4,183 AI plugins are listed on WordPress.org. 64% of them arrived in 2026.

[ 01 ] The flood

2,657 of the 4,183 AI plugins in the WordPress.org directory, 63.5%, were added in 2026.

Between January and August the directory added 2,289 AI plugins, against 410 in the same months of 2025, a change of +458.3%. That is 18.4% of the 12,464 plugins the whole directory added in those months, about one in 5, up from 11.4% of 3,609 a year earlier.

The directory added more AI plugins in the first 8 months of 2026 than in every earlier year put together.

Caveat. Counts only plugins still listed on the sample date. Plugins that were closed or removed are not in the API, so earlier years are undercounted.

[ 02 ] The long tail

2,728 AI plugins, 65.2%, report fewer than 10 active installs, and the median plugin reports fewer than 10.

Only 230 have 1,000 or more.

Youth explains most of the tail, not all of it: 25.7% of the plugins listed before 2025 still report fewer than 10 installs.

Caveat. WordPress.org reports any plugin with fewer than 10 active installs as 0, so this group includes plugins that nobody runs at all.

[ 03 ] Who holds the installs

Ten AI-first plugins hold 81.7% of the active installs of all 3,645 AI-first plugins, and the top 50 hold 95.1%.

The largest, AI Agent by SiteGround, holds 53% on its own.

Even with the general plugins set aside, 3,595 AI-first plugins share 4.9% of the installs.

Caveat. WordPress.org rounds active installs down (80+, 3,000+, 1 million+), so every share is approximate, and the largest plugins are the most understated.

173 plugins listed before ChatGPT existed now put an AI term in their name, among them Yoast SEO, WPForms, Rank Math SEO and All in One SEO. Across the whole directory, 7 of the 68 plugins with a million or more installs now carry an AI term in their name.

Caveat. The API returns only the current name, so this cannot say when each plugin added the term. These plugins are counted as general plugins throughout, not as AI-first.

[ 04 ] Left behind

580 AI plugins have not been updated in 12 months, 46.5% of those old enough to qualify, and 791 were last tested with a WordPress version more than two majors behind 7.1.

The stale plugins are not all obscure: 17 of them report 1,000 or more installs, and together the stale plugins report at least 236,000 active installs.

Caveat. "Tested up to" is self-reported and an old value does not mean a plugin is broken. It does mean nobody has said it works.

[ 05 ] The MCP wave

The mcp tag held 14 plugins before 2026 and holds 132 now.

Counting every plugin that mentions MCP or the Model Context Protocol anywhere in its listing, the number is 274, and 121 mention the WordPress Abilities API.

89.4% of the plugins in the mcp tag were listed in 2026.

Caveat. The before-and-after is dated by when each plugin was added, not by when it adopted the tag, so a plugin that added the tag later is counted from its original listing date.

[ 06 ] Who pays for the AI

At least 25.2% of AI-first plugins ask you to bring your own AI provider key, and at least 29.4% sell the AI as their own hosted service instead.

2.3% of the own-key plugins have reached 1,000 installs, against 2.3% of the hosted ones and 1.9% of the rest.

Few plugins in any model reach an audience: no pricing model has more than 2.3% of its plugins at 1,000 installs.

Caveat. Read from each listing's description with published keyword rules, so both shares are floors. On a hand-checked random sample the own-key rule was right 100% of the time it fired and caught 75% of cases; the hosted rule was right 92% of the time and caught 50%.

[ 07 ] Reviews

72.1% of AI plugins have never been reviewed.

Of the 1,166 that have, 70.8% have fewer than five reviews, and 741 show a perfect five stars from four reviews or fewer.

For 91.8% of AI plugins the listing shows no rating or one built on fewer than five reviews.

Caveat. A star average from one to four reviews says little. The page shows the review count next to every rating for that reason.

[ 08 ] Crowded and empty

Chatbots and assistants is the most crowded AI niche: 762 plugins, 20.9% of AI-first listings, with 1.7% of AI-first installs.

Developer and site-building tools is the emptiest, with 50.

Where the share of plugins sits well to the right of the share of installs, a niche has more plugins than users have found.

Caveat. Niches are assigned by keywords in each plugin's name, tags and summary. A plugin that does several things is counted once, under its strongest match.

[ 09 ] Momentum

Of the 100 most-installed AI-first plugins listed for at least a year, 84 are growing, 12 are flat and 4 are declining, measured on release-adjusted daily downloads over the last 90 days.

The median change against the 90 days before is +56%, against +16.7% for the 100 most-installed plugins in the directory with no AI signal, measured the same way.

Established AI plugins are gaining downloads faster than established plugins outside AI: a median of +56% against +16.7% for established non-AI plugins.

Caveat. WordPress.org counts every update as a download. Release spikes are removed, but the steady background of updates remains, so this measures direction, not new users. Only plugins listed for at least a year are included, so launches do not count as growth.