At WP Product Talk, a small study was carried out with a very small sample, but one that may be highly significant, on the impact of creating code, themes and plugins with AI on the WordPress ecosystem, specifically on developers who sell plugins.
The author, Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, found that 2025 was a somewhat unusual year for her revenue insofar as its growth and revenue pattern changed. She personally experienced a 17.8% drop in sales of new plugins in 2025, not counting renewals, and wanted to find out whether other plugin creators were also seeing a widespread decline in revenue.
Although there were exceptions, she did find that many plugin developers reported that their new sales in 2025 were the same as or lower than in 2024 and she wanted to look into the issue a little further by conducting a survey to gather more details.
She found that the more central and important plugins have indeed withstood the drop in revenue better, as expected, although there were also declines in this category. The plugins that are easier to replace, presumably with code created with AI, are the ones that have suffered the biggest drops.
Her small study also asked commercial plugin developers about the marketing channels they use. As expected, most said they depend primarily on organic traffic, SEO, mainly from Google Search, a channel that in turn considerably reduced traffic to their sources with the introduction of AI Overviews.
Developers mentioned that AI chatbots themselves sometimes point users directly to solutions, whether they include code or not, instead of recommending the plugins that directly solve those needs.
Other alternative channels, such as partnerships, affiliate programs, events, YouTube or social media, showed more stability, although they are not as important in terms of results. Actively doing marketing is increasingly seen as necessary when organic revenue declines.
Developers also mentioned more and more competition, again attributable to AI generated plugins, which is also affecting prices.
The article argues that plugins must become increasingly complete and comprehensive so that it is not easy to do without them, on the one hand, and, on the other, it mentions that it is necessary to stop depending on SEO traffic, which is clearly tending toward zero. Developers must start working on other marketing channels in order to survive.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
