Tips Tuesday – Google Search Changes, AI Rebound, Turn off AI Features

Tips this week include:

• How to prep for WP 7.0
• WP 7.0 still on hold
• Google to strip ad data analytics
• Google cracks down on Back button hijacks
• Google testing regular SERPs again
• WP and AI
• Why interoperability will be key
• Plugin to turn off AI features
• Cloudflare’s new AI Agent layer – and why I’m concerned
• AI support is failing – good news for us

WordPress Tips

How to Prep for WP 7.0

You know those things I said I was concerned about in WP 7.0? And then I told you the WP devs decided those things weren’t ready for release yet?

Well, other 3rd-party devs are doing what WP should be doing to get folks ready for this release.

Unleash WP has a nice article on preparing plugins and sites for WP 7.0.

I’m going through this checklist, along with 2 others and making my own checklist of what my clients and Webmaster Training members need to watch out for before they update.

WP 7.0 Still on Hold

WordCamp Asia just wrapped up last week and that may have impacted the continued delay of releasing WordPress 7.0. They may have suspended development for the week to allow everyone to attend or stream the events.

I’ll keep you posted when they announce a new timeline for the release of new test versions and then the final release date. Right now, it’s looking like sometime in May.

Monetization Tips

Google to Strip Ad Data Analytics

Google released an announcement that “on June 15, 2026, removes Google Signals from its current role as a co-controller of advertising data collection and consolidates that authority under Consent Mode settings managed within Google Ads.”

Most of you are with ad agencies that partner with Google Ads.

Could you do me a favor and check with your agency to see what they have to say about this upcoming change?

Google Cracks Down on Back Button Hijacks

Have you ever been to a site, then clicked your browser’s Back button only to see a pop up from the site you’re on with an ad or other pop up, like a subscription or such?

Yeah, that’s about to end.

Google will start issuing a Manual Action against sites that have this nasty little habit.

Now, be careful in what you read here.

This does not apply to pop ups that appear when the cursor moves away from the content – like before someone has a chance to click on the Back button. But my bet is that cursor-focus type of pop up may be the next thing in Google’s target area.

In fact, you’ll see a LOT of these types of cursor-focused pop ups in the article linked above, at least if you’re reading it on a laptop or such. I’m not sure how it works on phones.

AI and Your Site Tips

Google Testing Regular SERPs Again

Seems a lot of folks are scrolling past the AI Overviews (AIO) section at the top of Google Search in favor of seeing regular SERPs that contain blog posts and such from trusted sites.

So, Google is testing a column split where they show AIO on one side and regular Search results on the other side.

This is likely a desktop-only thing. I can’t see them making this work on mobile.

But it does speak to Google noticing search behavior and that many topics are just not suitable for getting good AI results. 

And for many of the things I search, Google shows videos or news sites first, not AIO results.

So, it seems Google is returning Search to what has worked well in the past, and they are not pushing AIO as hard anymore.

That’s really good news for bloggers.

WP and AI

Last year, WordPress created a new dev group for all things AI related.

And that’s a good thing as we need standards, especially with connecting to different AI models to bring things in from 3rd-party AI platforms.

WordPress has developed a special API connector to do just that.

So now, all themes and plugins that want to incorporate AI can securely connect to any AI model via a special API.

That will radically relieve each theme and plugin dev of having to build their own connection.

And that will radically improve security, at least with the transfer of data.

Interoperability Will Be the Key

All of the AI platforms are releasing “new and improved” models at least quarterly now.

And some are better at generating content and images while others are better at coding or AI Agent duties.

And then there was the whole debacle of Anthropic refusing a government contract that OpenAI too hastily agreed to, which cost them millions of users in protest.

Users discovered how hard it was to move all of their AI history to another platform.

And many users need to switch back and forth between platforms for a single project. That’s especially true for websites that need to provide multiple functions for content, sales, and support.

The trend now is for companies to make connections, like the one in WordPress, that will allow secure access for any AI model.

That way devs can make use of the model that best suits the need.

There are already companies that give access to multiple AI models for one price.

How this affects your site

I suspect that we will be seeing new plugins that pull from multiple AI models before this year is out.

Because of the associated AI costs, I doubt these plugins will be free, or they will have a free version with limited AI access, like a token limit or such. 

We already have several plugins that connect to OpenAI under your personal account or through their company account. I’m not a big fan of the latter, but that is the way things are going.

Plugin to Turn off AI Features

Deepak Gupta, who has over a decade of WP development experience, has recently released a plugin to turn off all AI features on a site. 

It’s set to Priority 1000 and overrides any AI features in WP, the theme, or in other plugins.

I’m testing it to see if this will be a good addition for me and my folks who don’t want AI connections on our sites – especially those slipped into plugins that we rely on.

The main thing I’m checking is if it turns off or simply denies the new AI API things in WP that I mentioned above. 

Cloudflare’s New AI Agent Layer

Cloudflare has released a new AI Platform.

It is designed specifically as a layer for AI Agents.

And it solves the issue of connecting multiple AI models.

This is what Cloudflare says about the rapid adoption by devs:

“Since launching AI Gateway and Workers AI, we’ve seen incredible adoption from developers building AI-powered applications on Cloudflare and we’ve been shipping fast to keep up! In just the past few months, we’ve refreshed the dashboard, added zero-setup default gateways, automatic retries on upstream failures, and more granular logging controls. Today, we’re making Cloudflare into a unified inference layer: one API to access any AI model from any provider, built to be fast and reliable.”

FYI, the Workers AI layer is specifically for running large AI models, like the kind companies use privately and train on their own content and documentation.

My Concern With This

Cloudflare’s main purpose for existing is to make sites faster with global caching and to protect sites from bad bot hits.

In doing so, they have been dragged into the AI bot world at a rapid pace. And until recently, the sole focus has been security.

But now they are seeing new AI-related opportunities everywhere.

A full 65% of their blog and dev publications this week are AI related – and not on security.

I’m not at all crazy about Cloudflare becoming an AI version of GitHub. FYI, in audits I’m already seeing more AI agent/bot hits from GitHub this year, and that’s not good.

I believe this fork is going to divert their focus into a whole other operation and that they will lose their identity to it.

The fact is, Cloudflare has been too focused on their Enterprise-level package for the last 2 years. Even those of us on the paid Pro version have little in the way of good support now. And folks on the free version are treated as guinea pigs for every new thing CF wants to roll out.

I suspect that the AI part of Cloudflare will eventually be forked into a new division. I sort of hope so. Maybe then we will again have a full division devoted to those of us who are not making use of AI development.

AI Support is Failing

It seems like every vendor I have to contact for support is now using some form of AI agent at the start of the ticket.

And fortunately, many of these companies are getting the message that AI is not doing a good job of it.

Forbes recently published an article about the “rebound of AI” and that companies are starting to hire back the employees they laid off and replaced with AI.

Here is a good TikTok explaining it, and another that helps fill out the story.

I’m just glad that companies are discovering that AI can’t replace humans in all cases.

Hang in there, y’all. The AI rebound in all ways is coming.