Contextual Tagging

[jeffpaul]

Feature Overview & Value

Summary

This feature provides AI-powered suggestions for post tags and categories based on a comprehensive analysis of the post's content (as well as title and excerpt). It helps authors apply a relevant and consistent taxonomy, improving content organization, discoverability, and on-site navigation.

Why it matters

Properly categorizing and tagging content is fundamental to an effective content strategy. It helps readers find related articles and signals relevance to search engines. However, this process is often inconsistent and subjective. This feature removes the guesswork by providing intelligent, context-aware suggestions, leading to a better-organized and more interconnected website.

Sample Use Cases

• Primary: An editor is reviewing a draft and wants to ensure it’s properly classified. They click a button to generate a list of relevant tags, choosing the most appropriate ones in seconds.
• A new author is unfamiliar with a site’s established categories and tags. They use the feature to get suggestions that align with the existing content structure.
• Post-MVP: A content team wants to improve the consistency of their content archive. They can open older posts and use the feature to add relevant tags that were missed originally.
• Post-MVP: A large publication with many contributing writers uses the feature to standardize taxonomy and prevent the creation of dozens of similar, redundant tags (e.g., "AI," "artificial-intelligence," "A.I.").

Taxonomy Strategy Handling

Why this matters: Different sites have different needs for their taxonomy. Some may prefer a few broad categories, while others rely on many specific, niche tags. The AI's suggestions should be able to adapt to the user's organizational strategy to be truly useful.

How Taxonomy Strategy is Set

• Global user preference (primary mechanism)
  • Set once in plugin settings.
  • Options might include:
    • Suggest new tags based on context vs. Only suggest existing tags
    • Post-MVP: Toggle on or off which post types are included
    • Toggle on or off which site taxonomies should be included (categories, tags, people, location, etc.) perhaps with categories/tags defaulted to on?
    • A sliding scale to select confidence threshold (for broader topics vs. more precise keywords, aka “precision” vs. “verbosity”), perhaps with different setting for taxonomy?
  • This setting controls the default prompt strategy and suggestion style.
• Per-post override (secondary)
  • An options link or dropdown within the suggestion UI in the editor sidebar.
  • Allows the user to request a different type of suggestion (e.g., "Suggest broader topics") for a single post without changing the global default.

Prompt construction

• Prompt templates adjust based on the selected confidence thresholds and taxonomies.
• Example (Specific): “Analyze this article and suggest 5-7 specific keyword tags. Prioritize using existing tags from this list: [list of site tags].”
• Example (Broad): “Analyze this article and suggest 1-2 high-level categories it belongs to from the following list: [list of site categories].”

User Interaction Flow

Overview: The goal is to provide taxonomy suggestions directly within the native WordPress interface for managing tags and categories, making the feature feel intuitive and accessible. The interaction should be quick, additive, and require minimal clicks to apply.

User Actions

• User sees the “Suggest Tags” / “Suggest Categories” button
  • Appears inside the "Tags" and "Categories" panels in the post editor sidebar.
  • Grayed out until the post contains a minimum amount of content (~150 words).
• User clicks the active button
  • A small loading indicator appears.
  • After a moment, a list of suggested terms is displayed directly within the panel.
• System displays suggested terms
  • Suggestions are shown as clickable pills or buttons.
  • The number of suggestions defaults to 5-7 but can be configured in settings.
  • Suggestions for existing site tags/categories may be styled differently from suggestions for new terms.
  • An option to "Regenerate" is visible.
• User selects or dismisses suggestions
  • Clicking a suggestion pill instantly adds it to the post's tags or assigns the category.
  • There is a clear way to dismiss the suggestions (e.g., a small "close" icon).

Failure states

• If the API call fails, a discreet message like "Could not get suggestions" appears with a "Retry" button. The user is not blocked from manually adding their own terms.

Alternate Entry Point: Empty Taxonomy with Post Content

This flow prompts users who have written content but haven't yet assigned any tags or categories. Potentially prioritized before the existing tags use case. Should also consider human-suggested tags vs. AI-suggested tags.

Trigger Condition

• Post content contains ≥ ~150 words.
• The post has no tags assigned and is in the default category.

System Behavior

• A light, one-line callout appears in the relevant sidebar panel:
  • “Need some tags? Get AI suggestions.”

User Action

• User clicks the prompt to trigger the suggestion UI.

Suggestion UI

• The same UI as the core flow is activated: a list of clickable suggestion pills appears within the panel.

Technical Requirements (High-Level)

• AI Input Requirements:
  • Current post title.
  • Full post content.
  • A list of all existing tags and categories on the website (to encourage consistency). Some AI models will look to embed existing terms in vector-space, helping it recommend content based on those terms.
  • The selected taxonomy strategy.
• AI Output Requirements:
  • A structured list of suggested terms (e.g., JSON array of strings).
  • Confidence threshold percent for each suggested term.
  • The model should distinguish between suggesting tags and categories.
• Model Agnosticism:
  • Supports text-based models via the WP AI Client SDK package (e.g., OpenAI, Claude, local LLMs).
  • Modular prompt design to allow for easy adaptation.
• Fail States & UX Expectations:
  • Errors must not block the user from saving, updating, or publishing the post.
  • The feature should gracefully handle posts with very short or no content.
• Privacy & Config:
  • API keys managed via the central WP AI Client SDK package.
  • User content is sent for processing according to user consent but is not stored long-term (perhaps at the settings level or per request to recommend terms).

Extensibility Notes

• Custom Taxonomy Support: Design to be adaptable for developers to enable suggestions for custom taxonomies.
• Hookable Pipeline: Provide hooks for developers to filter the content sent to the AI and the suggestions returned from it.
• Feedback Mechanism: Future iterations could include a simple "Was this helpful?" feedback loop to refine suggestion quality over time.

Open Questions / Design Notes

• For categories (which are hierarchical), should the AI be able to suggest parent/child relationships?
  • This exists in categories. Yes, this should be supported. This would need to be visually represented.
  • ClassifAI does not utilize child tags currently.
• Should we suggest tags and categories in a single, combined UI, or keep them as two separate actions in their respective panels? (Separate seems cleaner and more aligned with the WordPress UI).
  • To be explored in UI designs.

Design mockups

Version 1 - Contextual Tagging

Version 2 - Contextual Tagging

Props to Lauren Woodmansee for the product definition, Rachael Cortellessa for the designs, and Darin Kotter for technical review of both.

[estelaris]

This is very useful for content creators, whether it is a massive content creator or the occasional blogger.

Thoughts:

• Is adding more categories a good SEO strategy? This is not something I would offer by default but optional.
• Use cases: a new website that is starting to populate, AI could recommend terms or better terms to use as “categories” or,
• in an audit, AI could recommend better category terms or even merging 2+ similar categories
• Would adding categories be limited to roles or everyone would be allowed?
• Is it really necessary to identify that a tag has been added by AI?
• The unlimited adding of tags is not recommended for SEO. If users are unfamiliar with SEO basic principles, they could feel that adding as many tags as they can would be beneficial for them when it is the contrary. I would recommend that AI stops recommending new tags after a max of 5 have been recommended.
• Categories and tags are used for search purpose but also SEO, is it in the plans to feed some SEO basic rules to plugin or are we relying on what each AI model knows about SEO?

Thoughts on the UI options:

Version 1 feels familiar and non-intrusive, users would know there is the panel for categories and tags, with a couple of lines to introduce AI generated content

Version 2 has the options for categories/tags on 2 places: a panel at the bottom of the post and on the right-side panel can be confusing for users as they may not know which is the "real panel" that WordPress is reading. Which of the panels are they to trust or update.

This version has a lot of potential because it allows to capture all the options/possibilities for AI-generated content so perhaps working towards this panel-type and removing the ones that would duplicated in the right-side panel could be goal. Also, we need to test this version for accessibility and mobile use.

[karmatosed]

Thank you for this. I do think we can perhaps simplify the flow:

1. No categories assigned on publish preview off category suggestions.
2. Categories assigned, offer some suggested ones also from a prompt.

With the first suggestion, one thing we can maybe start to avoid during this is 'uncategorized' which is a bit of a bane of WordPress at this point.

I also wonder about the wand/generation link. I think having a clear message and button works maybe better. For example:

To answer direct questions:

For categories (which are hierarchical), should the AI be able to suggest parent/child relationships?

I think so.

Should we suggest tags and categories in a single, combined UI, or keep them as two separate actions in their respective panels? (Separate seems cleaner and more aligned with the WordPress UI).

Seperate as they are today. Combining them along with adding generation feels a confusion. It might be something to explore in another experiment, but not all in the same one.

[jeffpaul]

With the first suggestion, one thing we can maybe start to avoid during this is 'uncategorized' which is a bit of a bane of WordPress at this point.

Note that Rename default category from uncategorized to general or similar. was recently opened in core trac.