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Guide

How to disclose an AI chatbot on WordPress

Most advice about the AI Act only covers labelling images. That is half of it. If people can talk to an AI on your site, a chat widget, a support bot, an assistant, you also have to tell them it is not a person. Here is how to do that.

A not-human attaching a small glowing mint label to the corner of a chat window in a sunlit studio

Practical guide · last reviewed August 2026

01Summary3 points

The short version

  • Article 50 asks for two different things. One is about the AI content you publish. The other is about AI your visitors can talk to. Both start 2 August 2026.
  • If someone might think they are talking to a person, say that they are not. In plain words, right at the start.
  • AIM Transparency adds the notice for you, gives you two shortcodes to place it by hand, and shows you which AI is already running on your site.

02The dutyArticle 50(1)

50(1) and 50(4) are not the same obligation

These two get mixed up all the time. Here they are side by side.

Article 50(1)

Interaction

What triggers it
A person interacts with an AI system.
On a WordPress site
Chat widgets, support bots, AI search, assistants.
Who it lands on
The provider, and you as deployer of the interface.
The remedy
Tell them it is an AI.

Article 50(4)

Content

What triggers it
You publish AI-generated or AI-manipulated content.
On a WordPress site
AI images, video, audio, synthetic text.
Who it lands on
The deployer publishing the content.
The remedy
A visible label plus machine-readable provenance.

You can skip the notice if it is already obvious that people are talking to a machine. A widget clearly labelled as a bot probably qualifies. A chat bubble with a first name and a friendly photo does not. If anything about it suggests a person, say so.

For the full picture, read the EU AI Act guide for WordPress.

03What countsThe usual suspects

What actually counts as an AI interaction

Most sites that need this never set out to build a chatbot. It came with a plugin or a snippet someone pasted in:

  • Support and sales widgets that answer with AI, such as Intercom, Drift, Tidio, Crisp, HubSpot, Tawk or LiveChat. The AI usually hides behind a friendly-looking bubble, which is exactly the problem.
  • AI search boxes that write you an answer instead of returning a list of links.
  • Assistant blocks and shortcodes from AI plugins, including one you added to a single page months ago and forgot about.
  • Anything you built yourself on top of an AI API. Your own code counts too.

What does not count: spam filters, recommendation engines, translation running quietly in the background. This is about people talking to an AI, not about AI existing somewhere on your server.

04PlacementWhere it belongs

Where the disclosure belongs

The question is simple: does someone see it before they start typing?

  • Works: a line in the first message, a label on the chat button, or a short note next to the chat itself.
  • Does not work: a line in your privacy policy, a footer link, or a notice that only shows up after a few replies.

Keep it ordinary. "You are chatting with an AI assistant, not a human." is enough. Do not dress it up in legal language: what matters is that people understand it, not that you technically said it.

05The walkthrough3 steps

Adding the disclosure

  1. Turn the notice on. In Transparency > Settings > Chatbot disclosure, enable Show the AI-assistant notice and set your wording. The plugin renders a small disclosure pill on pages where it detects a known chat widget.
  2. Add your own selector if your widget is unusual. The same panel takes CSS selectors, one per line or comma-separated, for widgets the detector does not recognise.
  3. Or place it by hand where you want it. For a chat UI you built yourself, the shortcode route is guaranteed: [aicl_ai_notice] drops the chatbot notice anywhere shortcodes run. [aicl_disclosure type="chatbot" style="banner"] gives you the same thing with control over the style.

The shortcodes are not chatbot-only. [aicl_disclosure] takes a type of ai-generated, ai-edited, ai-assisted or chatbot, a style of inline, badge or banner, and a text attribute when you want your own sentence. They are the tool for disclosing AI in writing, where an image badge has nothing to attach to.

06Find what is running672 AI systems

Finding the AI already on your site

You cannot disclose an assistant you did not know you had. On a site with a few years of plugins behind it, that happens more than you would think.

The free Detection card in the dashboard checks two things and keeps both on your own server. It reads your installed plugins and your own front page against a registry of 672 AI systems, and it separates chatbots and assistants (the 50(1) duty) from image and content generators (50(4)), so you can see which obligation applies to what. Reading the front page matters: a widget injected by a script tag never appears in your plugin list.

Want to look before installing anything? The free site checker runs the same list against any public URL.

07Questions4 answered

Frequently asked questions

My chat widget is obviously a bot. Do I still need a notice?
Possibly not. The article excuses disclosure where the AI is obvious to a reasonably well-informed person in the circumstances. But "obvious" is judged on the design a visitor actually meets, not on what you know. A launcher labelled AI assistant is one thing; a bubble with a first name and a face is another. The notice costs you a line of text, so the cautious call is usually the right one.
Does this apply if my visitors are not in the EU?
The Act reaches systems whose output is used in the EU, so a site that serves EU visitors is generally in scope regardless of where it is hosted or who runs it. If you take orders, enquiries or traffic from the EU, work on the basis that it applies.
Is the vendor responsible, or am I?
Both, in different places. The provider of the AI system has design-side obligations. You are the deployer of the interface your visitors meet, and the disclosure they see is on the page you publish. Do not assume a third-party widget already discloses adequately; open it as a visitor and check what it actually says.
Does the notice slow my site down?
No. It is a small stylesheet and a short snippet of markup, and the stylesheet only loads on pages where a notice actually renders. Nothing is fetched from a third party, and no visitor data leaves your server.

08Keep reading9 guides

A studio assistant reviewing a row of framed prints, some marked with an AI badgeThe law

The EU AI Act and WordPress (Article 50)

Who Article 50 covers, the 2 August 2026 deadline, the penalties, and exactly what a WordPress site owner must do, in plain English.

Read guide A studio assistant placing AI-disclosure badges on a wall of framed imagesThe how-to

How to label AI images in WordPress

A step-by-step walkthrough: install the plugin, flag an image from the Media Library, and get the badge, embedded metadata and JSON-LD automatically.

Read guide A studio assistant pressing a provenance seal onto a photo print beside a card catalogueThe metadata

What IPTC DigitalSourceType actually is

The machine-readable tag behind “AI-generated”: what the IPTC DigitalSourceType vocabulary means, the values AIM Transparency writes for AI and human provenance alike, and why it future-proofs your images.

Read guide A shop assistant tagging AI-disclosed products in a boutique, with a badged product photo on the counterThe shop

Disclose AI product images in WooCommerce.

Selling with AI product photos? Put the “AI Generated” badge across your shop grid, your categories and the single-product gallery, free, plus embedded provenance, on any theme. Compliance and buyer trust, in one move.

Read guide A not-human laying a small mint disclosure strip along the top edge of a page of writingWritten text

How to disclose AI-written text in WordPress

The half of Article 50(4) nobody quotes. Whether the text duty reaches your site at all, how to record it per post, and why human review on its own is not the exemption.

Read guide Five different not-human characters each tagging their own framed photographLanguages

Your AI disclosure has to be in a language visitors read

Article 50 asks you to inform the person. An English badge on a Polish shop does not. How disclosure works across 22 EU languages, and where the wording comes from.

Read guide A not-human joining two wooden panels with a single glowing mint cordFor developers

Show an AI disclosure automatically with WordPress hooks

One filter, one condition, one call to do_shortcode. Copy-paste recipes for categories, custom fields, WooCommerce and block themes.

Read guide A not-human in a sunlit workshop feeding a photograph through a hand press, with three progressively smaller copies emerging, each already carrying a small glowing mint sealThe release

What WordPress 7.1 changes for AI image provenance

7.1 can rebuild your images in the browser before they ever reach your server. What that does to provenance written inside the file, what we measured against the release candidate, and the one line that turns it off.

Read guide

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