Claude is one of the best models on the market for long-form writing: clear structure, coherent paragraphs, very low rate of hallucinations on factual content. AI Content Generator lets you put Claude in charge of an entire WordPress editorial pipeline — from raw title ideas to fully formatted drafts ready to be reviewed and published — without writing a single line of code. This tutorial shows you exactly how to set up that pipeline.
By the end of the guide you’ll have a working campaign that, every time it runs, asks Claude to produce a brand-new article based on your brief, your tone, your structure and your target length. We’ll cover the AI provider configuration, the content brief, the extra instructions that turn a generic model into a writer that matches your voice, the scheduling that controls when posts go live, and the safety controls you should always keep enabled.
The assumption is that you already have a Claude API key configured inside AI Content Generator. If you haven’t done it yet, read our companion tutorial on creating a Claude API key first — it takes ten minutes. Once the key is in, everything below works.
Why use Claude for WordPress automation
Before diving into the screens, it’s worth understanding what Claude brings to a WordPress workflow that other models don’t. Claude was specifically trained to be useful on long writing tasks: it tends to keep the same tone for thousands of words, it follows structural instructions (“write 8 H2 sections, the last one is a conclusion”) with high accuracy, and it generally produces fewer filler sentences than other models. For a SEO-oriented blog where the goal is publishing real, useful articles at scale, those qualities translate directly into less editing time per draft.
The flipside is that Claude can be slightly slower per article than the cheapest OpenAI tier, and the pricing model is different (input tokens are cheap, output tokens are the heavier line item). AI Content Generator handles the cost arithmetic for you with the content brief — you tell the plugin “write me 1,500-word articles” and it makes sure Claude stays within that band, so cost per piece stays predictable.
Step 1 — Open a new campaign
Inside WordPress, go to AI Content Generator → Campaigns → Add New. The plugin shows you the campaign editor: a familiar WordPress post-edit screen with several metaboxes both in the main column and in the right sidebar. The very first thing to do is type a campaign name at the top — for example Blog claude-sonnet-4 — June 2026. The name is internal only, it won’t appear anywhere on your public site, but it will save your future self a lot of confusion when you have ten campaigns running side by side.
Step 2 — Pick Claude as the AI provider for this campaign
In the right sidebar, locate the AI Provider metabox. If you have set Claude as your global default in Settings, it should already be selected — the dropdown shows “Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4)” and the status row reads “Claude: configured” with a green dot. If you have multiple providers configured, you can change the choice here without affecting other campaigns: each campaign carries its own provider override.
Two practical recommendations. First, choose the Claude model that fits the campaign goal: Claude Sonnet 4 is the workhorse for everyday blog posts, Claude Opus is overkill for short news but pays off for pillar articles you’ll be linking to for years. Second, never leave the provider on “Global default” if you publish across multiple blogs from the same site — switching the global default later would silently change the writer on every old campaign.
Step 3 — Fill the content brief (the part Claude really reads)
Scroll down to the SEO brief (content) panel in the main column. This is the most important block of the entire campaign: everything you set here is fed to Claude as part of the system prompt, on every single article. Sloppy values here produce sloppy articles forever.
- Article length — pick the band: short news (300–600 words), medium (700–1,200), long-form (1,500–2,000) or pillar (2,500+). Claude generates in chunks under the hood and merges them, so the final article reliably lands inside the band.
- Content preset — choose the format that matches your editorial intent: how-to tutorial, listicle, comparison, news roundup, FAQ Q&A, opinion piece. Each preset comes with a baseline structure Claude will respect.
- Tone — professional, friendly, expert, casual, playful, technical. The tone propagates not only into word choice but also into sentence length: “expert” produces denser paragraphs, “playful” produces shorter, punchier ones.
- Structure — number of H2 sections, presence of TL;DR, presence of a FAQ block at the end, whether to add a comparison table. Claude respects the structural request with very high accuracy.
Step 4 — Use Extra AI Instructions for your voice
Right below the content brief there is a textarea called Extra AI instructions (campaign). This is where you turn a generic Claude into your writer. Anything you type here is prepended to every Claude call inside this campaign. Useful instructions to include from day one:
- Brand voice: “Write in first person plural, never in second person. Avoid superlatives, never use the word ‘revolutionary’.”
- Topical guardrails: “If the title asks for medical or legal advice, refuse and ask the user to consult a professional. Never make health claims.”
- Format conventions: “Always include a 2-3 sentence TL;DR at the top. End every article with a ‘You’re done’ section that wraps up in plain language.”
- Linking rules: “When mentioning the AI Content Generator plugin, always link to /how-to/. When mentioning Anthropic, link to console.anthropic.com only once per article.”
These instructions stay invisible to the reader but Claude follows them religiously. Tweak them after the first 10 articles based on the edits you find yourself doing — every recurring edit is a sign of an instruction you should add here.
Step 5 — Feed Claude a list of titles
Move to the Titles (generation & selection) panel. You have two options that you can combine freely. The first is Manual titles: paste a list of article titles (one per line) directly into the textarea. The second is Auto-generate: in the SEO brief (titles) panel above, write a topic and a few keywords, and AI Content Generator asks Claude to propose a batch of titles for you to approve.
In practice, the most reliable workflow is hybrid: generate twenty titles automatically, copy the ones you like into the manual list, drop the ones you don’t, and then launch generation only on the curated subset. This is faster than writing titles yourself but keeps you in control of the editorial line.
Step 6 — Decide where the posts land
Scroll back up to the Base data panel. Here you pick:
- Content type — post is the right answer 95% of the time; pick a custom post type only if you have a niche use case (knowledge base, glossary).
- Output status — always start with Draft for the first ten articles. Once you trust the output, you can switch to Pending review or even Publish.
- Author — pick a real WordPress user. Search engines and readers prefer named authors; AI-content best practices recommend keeping a human accountable.
- Categories — assign one or more. The plugin will respect them and will also let Claude pick a primary category from the list, based on title relevance.
Step 7 — Schedule (or not) with the editorial calendar
The Interval between generations field controls the cadence. Set it to 0 and Claude writes all the queued titles in one burst as soon as you click Generate. Set it to 1440 (minutes per day) and Claude writes one article per day. Set it to anything in between and the plugin schedules WP-Cron jobs at that frequency.
The matching Editorial Calendar view (AI Content Generator → Calendar) shows you the next ten generations on a calendar, so you can see what’s scheduled and rearrange titles by drag-and-drop. If you want random publishing within working hours rather than fixed intervals, enable Random window and pick the start/end hour: Claude generates whenever there’s room inside the window.
Step 8 — Launch and watch the first generation live
You’re now one click away from your first Claude-written WordPress post. Confirm one more time that Output status: Draft is selected (so nothing goes live by accident), then click the blue Generate content for selected titles button at the top of the right sidebar.
The plugin shows a progress strip: “Generating 1 of N — querying Anthropic API…”. After 20–40 seconds the first draft appears in your Posts → Drafts list. Open it: you should see a clean, well-structured article that respects the length band, the tone, the structure and the extra instructions you wrote. From here it’s normal WordPress: review, tweak a sentence or two, add an internal link, publish.
Step 9 — Quality controls: keep duplicates and weak intros out
Two settings deserve special attention because they make the difference between “AI content that ranks” and “AI content that hurts the site”. Both live in the campaign editor.
- Anti-duplicates (published titles only) — enable it. AI Content Generator checks every newly generated title against everything already published on your site and skips any title with too high a similarity score. This is the single biggest protection against cannibalization.
- Anti-duplicates (content) — when enabled, the plugin re-feeds the model the existing intros on your site and asks Claude to avoid reusing the same openings. Useful on niche blogs where many articles touch the same topic.
Pair these with a sensible Frequency penalty (0.3–0.5) and a low Presence penalty (0.1–0.2), and Claude produces articles that don’t repeat themselves and don’t repeat each other.
Common troubleshooting
- The plugin says “Claude: not configured” — open Settings, paste the API key again, save. Most of the time it’s a trailing space or a half-copied key.
- The first article looks generic — your extra AI instructions are likely empty. Spend ten minutes writing your brand voice instructions and try again.
- Articles are shorter than the target band — Claude obeys the band but tends to stay at the lower bound by default. Add an instruction “Aim for the upper bound of the target length” in the extra instructions.
- WP-Cron never fires — your hosting may have disabled internal WordPress cron. Read our companion guide on setting up an external cron, or contact your provider to enable it.
You’re done — and now what?
With one campaign live, you have a Claude-powered editorial pipeline running on autopilot. The next moves are about scale and quality. Start by adding a fallback provider in Settings: OpenAI or Gemini step in automatically if Anthropic returns a rate-limit error, so your daily publishing cadence never breaks. Then add a second campaign focused on a different topical cluster — Claude is excellent at keeping multiple tones coexisting on the same WordPress site as long as each campaign has its own extra instructions.
Finally, give yourself a weekly fifteen-minute review slot. Open the calendar, scan the next ten titles, drop the ones that don’t fit, add five new ones. That is the entire ongoing workload: the model writes, the cron publishes, you steer.