Ever have an issue with a WordPress site and google something like “advanced payments not showing credit cards”? or the ‘white screen of death?’ Only to be met with dubious answers? This is because AI summaries appearing in search engines are scraping the web. And increasingly they are using what we call AI slop – or AI generated articles that have obliterated real blog posts with real answers (like this one that you are reading!)

AI trained on AI slop is even worse than AI trained on just content on the web. The AI doesn’t know it’s AI slop it’s summarizing and in turn, that AI slop summarized something else that may or may not be true or correct.

What you end up with, if you’re a new developer, is barking up the wrong tree or falling down some rabbit hole of possible solutions only to have none of them work. Because they aren’t real.

How you can find verifiable, quality help for WordPress:

Fortunately, WP existed long before AI and there are some really respected places where you can find quality information. If it’s WordPress core issues, try wordpress.org and log in to search the support forums. This is probably the hardest of the two methods I’m recommending because it will return a LOT of results which may not be relevent. The second is to go directly to and log into the plugin developers’ website and check THEIR forums. Now, you probably already know both those things and do them regularly, but as a developer who routinely breaks stuff because we’re on the bleeding edge, you may have to dig deeper. How many times have I informed developers of an issue with their plugin that they patch hours, days or weeks later? Too many times to count!

Digging deeper is where you get in trouble with AI because you’re searching with AI. You can search without AI but the content you receive may still be generated with AI.

How to discern the difference between AI content and actual WordPress developer-led content?

  1. is it a quality reputable site like wordpress.org, WPBeginner, a theme or plugin developer’s site?
  2. Is the post written in overly broad terms with a lot of things to try? Most developers will put one or two very specific things (often with code snippets) that you might need to do, but not a whole 1-10 list of things to try
  3. It probably is more specific than “disable all plugins and use the default theme” – although some developers DO have you do this, it’s almost NEVER a first-line solution, because if you disable them all, you might not even be able to recreate the problem, having removed the things you were testing!
  4. Is the content overly short and using somewhat flowery language. You’ll be able to tell if it is worded strangely. Sometimes this is because the developers’ native language isn’t English but even then, you can usually discern AI content by reading a post.
  5. Is the fix it overly broad? For instance, one AI summary on a particularly tricky 502 error on a client site suggested that we simply allocate more resources to the settings, not even recognizing WP core maxxed out at 1MB for that particular setting. It also suggested a plugin conflict right off the bat. The end result was a loading resource error and we ended up dropping some code that just told the site “don’t load these three things first.”

If these five things are not there and it really does seem like it’s a plausible fix, and you’ve verified the source to be credible, dive in and make those code changes or hop into the database for fix.

What is the future of AI-generated tech support?

While we’re on the subject of AI, almost all first-level support will become AI. You’re going to have get to level 2 ( human) and Level 3 (an actual knowledgeable human) to get any kind of resolution anymore. If you have a developer (me!) or need one (also, me!) you can reach out to an actual person for a help session to fix your website.

Use forums and ask questions. They are typically going to have better answers because they are behind a login wall and cannot be scraped by the AI.

Give the AI a really complex question so it taps out immediately for L2 support. The more complex the sooner you’re going to get a “would you like to connect to support?” You’re going to get a L1 support person, do the same thing. You’re going to get the “did you turn off all plugins and use the default theme” and remind them that the functionality that is not working IS associated with the plugin.

These strategies will help you get the most out of troubleshooting issues on your WordPress websites without AI slop.