Summarize with AI — WordPress Plugin

Adds a row of "Summarize with AI" buttons to your content. Each button opens ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity or Google AI Mode with a prompt already filled in, asking it to summarize the page the visitor was reading.

The buttons are plain links. There is no API call, no API key, no cost and nothing sent from your server.

For the full write-up, see Summarize with AI WordPress Plugin.

Features

• Five AI services — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, each toggled independently. Only assistants with a working prefill parameter are bundled; see Why not Gemini or Copilot?.
• Customizable prompt with ten placeholders resolved per page.
• Automatic placement before and/or after the content of the post types you pick — no theme editing.
• Shortcode and block, both rendered by the same PHP so they can never drift apart.
• Three button styles, two layouts and an icon-only mode.
• Copy-prompt button for AI tools that have no shareable link.
• "Add as a preferred source on Google" button — its own shortcode, block and settings tab, so readers can nominate your site in Google Search.
• Optional click tracking via the gtag() or dataLayer your site already loads. Off by default.
• Conditional assets — CSS and JS load only on pages that render the buttons.
• Live preview in the settings — the Appearance tab shows real buttons updating as you change style, layout, label and services, before you save.
• Translation ready, with languages/summarize-with-ai.pot included.

Requirements

Installation

1. Upload the summarize-with-ai folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate it through the Plugins menu.
3. Configure it under Settings → Summarize with AI.

Plugin structure

summarize-with-ai/
├── admin/
│   └── settings.php                # Settings page view
├── assets/
│   ├── css/{admin,public}.css
│   ├── img/*.svg                   # Service icons
│   └── js/{block,frontend}.js
├── blocks/summarize-with-ai/
│   └── block.json                  # Block metadata
├── blocks/summarize-with-ai-google-source/
│   └── block.json
├── includes/
│   ├── admin.php                   # Menu, setting registration, upgrades
│   ├── frontend.php                # Prompt, renderer, shortcode, block, placement
│   ├── google-source.php           # "Preferred source on Google" button
│   ├── options.php                 # Defaults, accessors, sanitization
│   └── services.php                # AI service registry
├── languages/summarize-with-ai.pot
├── summarize-with-ai.php           # Bootstrap
└── uninstall.php

Usage

Automatic placement

Settings → Summarize with AI → Placement: choose before, after or both, and tick the post types. Posts that already contain the shortcode or the block are skipped, so you never get duplicates.

Blocks

• Summarize with AI — the AI button row. Its sidebar controls which services show, the label, style, layout, service names and the copy-prompt button.
• Add as Preferred Source on Google — the Google button on its own, with label and alignment controls.

Shortcode

[summarizewithai]

In a template file:

<?php echo do_shortcode( '[summarizewithai]' ); ?>

Or call the renderer directly:

<?php echo summarizewithai_render( array( 'services' => 'claude,chatgpt' ) ); ?>

Shortcode attributes

[summarizewithai services="claude,chatgpt" style="outline" label="Ask AI about this:"]

Add as a preferred source on Google

Google Search lets readers nominate sites they want to see more of. This button links to google.com/preferences/source for your domain, so a reader can add you in one click.

It is about the site, not the post: no prompt, no AI service, and the same link on every page. Google's mark is multicolour, so the button keeps a neutral pill surface rather than a brand fill.

Settings → Summarize with AI → Google offers seven placements:

The three placements that travel with the AI buttons follow the AI post types. The three standalone ones have their own post-type list and a default alignment.

Placed among the AI buttons it uses a second, shorter label (Inline button text, default "Add on Google") — "Add {site_name} as a preferred source on Google" dwarfs neighbours called ChatGPT and Claude. It keeps a light surface in every button style, because the four-colour G cannot sit on a brand fill and stay legible. Automatic placement is skipped on any post that already contains the Google shortcode or block, and when the AI buttons are set to appear both before and after the content the invitation is added only once, to the last copy — repeating the buttons is useful, repeating a follow request is not.

Place it by hand with the block or the shortcode:

[summarizewithai_google_source]
[summarizewithai_google_source align="center" label="Add us as a preferred source on Google »"]

Two button options

The official button is the one in Google's preferred sources guide. Choosing it loads https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js in the page head, but only on pages where the button actually appears — a site on the default setting never contacts Google at all. That third-party request is why it is opt-in.

Its markup is Google's, so the plugin's label, colours and icon settings do not apply to it.

Google renders that button inside a cross-origin iframe and forces the host element to width: 100%. Nothing inside the frame can be styled, and left alone the button spans the full content width with alignment having no effect. The plugin caps it at --swi-gs-official-width (default 360px), which restores its own footprint and makes align work. Widen it if a translated label needs more room.

The iframe is transparent in both themes, verified against the live widget. A solid band behind the button comes from your own CSS, not from Google: themes commonly ship iframe { background: #fff } to hide the load flash on video embeds. The plugin overrides that for its own button, without !important.

Eligibility and expectations

Google accepts domains and subdomains only, never subdirectories: example.com and news.example.com are eligible, example.com/blog is not. The plugin normalizes whatever you enter down to the host (https://www.example.com/blog/ becomes example.com) and warns you when it has dropped a path. Override the domain under the Google tab if you are on a staging copy and need the live domain in the link.

Check that your site already appears in the source preferences tool before publishing the button; the settings screen links straight to it for your domain.

Preferred Sources changes what each reader who opts in sees in Top Stories, and in AI Overviews and AI Mode where those exist. It does not change your rankings for everyone, and it does not guarantee placement.

Placeholders

Usable anywhere in the prompt:

The whole generated link is trimmed to 1800 characters so browsers and CDNs accept it.

Hooks

Filters

Adding a service

add_filter( 'summarizewithai_services', function ( $services ) {
    $services['mistral'] = array(
        'label'      => 'Le Chat',
        'url'        => 'https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=',
        'icon'       => '',          // File name inside assets/img/, or '' for no icon.
        'color'      => '#fa500f',
        'hover'      => '#c93d0b',
        'is_default' => false,       // Whether it is on for a fresh install.
    );

    return $services;
} );

A registered service appears on the settings screen with its own on/off switch and URL field, and becomes valid in the shortcode's services attribute. Its colours are applied through inline CSS custom properties, so no stylesheet change is needed.

Why not Gemini or Copilot?

Every bundled service has a prefill parameter that was checked against the live site. Two popular assistants do not, so they are deliberately absent:

• Google Gemini — gemini.google.com/app ignores both ?q= and ?prompt=; the chat opens empty. The browser extensions that appear to add this work by injecting the text client-side, which a link cannot do. Google AI Mode is bundled instead: it is a Search surface, so the ordinary q= carries the prompt and udm=50 selects AI Mode.
• Microsoft Copilot — copilot.microsoft.com/?q= used to prefill, but Microsoft disabled it to harden Copilot against prompt injection.

A button that opens an empty chat is worse than no button, so the copy-prompt button covers these tools instead: the visitor copies the prompt and pastes it wherever they like.

If a service adds a prefill parameter later, register it with the filter above — no plugin change needed. Verify the link in a logged-out browser window first.

Hiding the buttons on certain content

add_filter( 'summarizewithai_should_display', function ( $display, $post_id ) {
    return has_term( 'sponsored', 'post_tag', $post_id ) ? false : $display;
}, 10, 2 );

Styling

public.css contains no !important, so everything it sets stays overridable. It does state every property the layout depends on — padding, radius, colour, typography, image resets — rather than trusting inherited values, because themes restyle links and content images heavily. Selectors stay at two or three classes: enough to beat the usual .entry-content a rules, low enough that one more class overrides them.

Custom properties

The intended way to retheme, with no specificity fight at all. Set them on the wrapper, a single button, or :root:

.share-with-ai {
    --swi-radius: 999px;
    --swi-gap: 6px;
    --swi-pad-y: 6px;
    --swi-pad-x: 14px;
    --swi-font-size: 12px;
    --swi-icon-size: 18px;
}

.summarize-with-claude {
    --swi-bg: #b04c2f;
    --swi-bg-hover: #8f3d26;
}

Classes

One deliberate exception

The Google preferred-source button carries neither .summarize-with-ai-icon nor .share-ai, even when it sits inside the AI row. Themes that restyle the row commonly write rules like:

.share-with-ai .share-ai a,
.share-with-ai .summarize-with-ai-icon { color: #fff !important; }

Those are correct for AI service buttons, which have brand fills and white glyphs. Applied to the Google button they render white text on the white surface its four-colour mark requires — and !important cannot be outranked without more !important. Staying out of those selectors is the only fix that works on every theme. Use .swi-btn to style all buttons at once, and .swi-google-source-button for the Google one:

/* Match a theme that rounds the AI buttons into pills. */
.share-with-ai .swi-google-source-button--inline {
    border-radius: 999px;
}

Security

• Settings post to options.php, so WordPress handles the nonce and the manage_options check.
• All input passes through one sanitization callback; invalid URLs, unknown services, post types and style values fall back to defaults.
• All output is escaped, and links carry rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer".
• No database queries outside the Options API.

Privacy

The plugin sets no cookies, stores no visitor data and sends nothing to the author. Click tracking is off by default; when enabled it forwards events to the analytics library your site already loads. Clicking a button takes the visitor to a third-party AI service under that service's own terms and privacy policy.

Development

Regenerate the translation template after changing any string:

wp i18n make-pot . languages/summarize-with-ai.pot

Building a release

Double-click build.bat, or run it from a terminal. It produces dist/summarize-with-ai-wp-<version>.zip, ready to upload through Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.

The folder inside the ZIP is summarize-with-ai-wp, matching this repository's slug, so WordPress treats the upload as an update to an existing install rather than a second copy of the plugin. Nothing in the code hardcodes a folder name; every path derives from __FILE__.

It refuses to build if:

• the Version: header, the SWI_VERSION constant and readme.txt's Stable tag: disagree, which would ship an update that never triggers or a changelog describing the wrong release;
• any PHP file has a syntax error (skipped if PHP is not on PATH, though it also looks in the usual Laragon locations).

Development files are excluded: .git, _dev, dist, build.bat, .gitignore and .gitattributes never reach the ZIP.

It needs nothing installed beyond Windows itself: robocopy for the copy and PowerShell for the archive.

The archive entries are written one at a time under names the script controls, rather than with ZipFile::CreateFromDirectory. On .NET Framework, which is what Windows PowerShell 5.1 runs on, that method writes the platform separator into entry names. The ZIP format requires forward slashes, so the result looks correct on Windows and then unpacks on a Linux host as a flat pile of files literally named summarize-with-ai-wpdmin\settings.php. PowerShell 7 fixed it; 5.1 is what a double-clicked .bat gets. After writing the archive the script reopens it and refuses to ship if any entry still contains a backslash.

Changelog

See readme.txt for the full changelog.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at walterpinem/summarize-with-ai-wp.

This plugin is distributed through GitHub and the author's site; it is not on the WordPress.org plugin directory. readme.txt is still kept in valid WordPress.org format so nothing blocks a future submission.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE. Author: Walter Pinem.