WordPress – Use AI to Generate Excerpts from Post Content

In this tutorial, we will show you how to auto generate excerpts for WordPress posts using AI. You will learn the easiest way to automatically write WordPress post summaries using artificial intelligence. This will completely simplify your WordPress blog workflow and save you a lot of time.

A post excerpt on WordPress is a short summary of your post. It gives readers a quick idea of what your post is about. By default, WordPress takes the first 55 words of your post as the excerpt. However, this might not always capture the main point of your content. Of course, manually writing an excerpt for each post is a job that could take you many hours. In addition to the energy and creativity used to write your posts, you will need extra energy and creativity to craft engaging post excerpts.

Fortunately, WP Sheet Editor – AI is your best companion for writing post excerpts using artificial intelligence. You can use any AI provider (OpenAI, OpenRouter, Ollama, and others) and any language model compatible with OpenAI models. This way, you will be able to generate summaries of your WordPress posts that are interesting and correctly summarize the main idea of the content of your post.

What you need to generate auto excerpts with generative AI

To write summaries or excerpts of your posts like a pro, you need the following essentials:

1) WP Sheet Editor – Post Types

With this plugin, you can view and manage WordPress posts, pages and custom post types in a spreadsheet. It simplifies your workflow with advanced search, bulk edit, export, and import tools.

2) WP Sheet Editor – AI

WP Sheet Editor – AI is a WordPress AI assistant tool that allows you to connect with your favorite AI providers and integrate the use of generative AI to every WP Sheet Editor spreadsheet. You can easily create and edit WordPress content in bulk with just a few clicks.

3) External API provider

The AI functionality in WP Sheet Editor relies on an external API from AI providers like OpenAI, OpenRouter, etc. You’ll need an account with the provider and an API key to connect.

WP Sheet Editor – AI is compatible with these AI providers:

• Open AI for text and images (more info here)
• OpenRouter (more info here)
• Any other provider that uses the same format as OpenAI.

Follow this guide to learn how to set up AI providers in WP Sheet Editor – AI.

Once you’ve set up everything, you can start generating WordPress post excerpts using generative AI.

How to generate WordPress post excerpts

The best way to use AI to auto-generate excerpts for your WordPress posts is to summarize the content of the post in a specific number of words or sentences. To do this, you have at least two options. You can generate excerpts by entering a prompt in the spreadsheet cells, or you can generate hundreds of excerpts in bulk.

You need to open the WordPress posts spreadsheet by going to WP Sheet Editor > Edit posts. You’ll see all your WordPress posts displayed on the spreadsheet.

Option 1 – Generate post excerpts in spreadsheet cells

As you can see, we have some WordPress posts missing excerpt, so we can generate excerpts by summarizing the post content with generative AI.

Optionally, we can filter all the posts without excerpts using the Search tool.

Once you’re in the Search tool, select these values to filter all the WordPress posts that are missing excerpts:

• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox.
• Field: Excerpt
• Operator: =
• Value: Leave this field empty.
• Click on Run search.

After running the search, you’ll see all the posts missing excerpt displayed on the spreadsheet. You can see the active search filters above the spreadsheet.

To add prompts in the spreadsheet cells, you have these two options:

• Add the ai:prompt-slug shortcut. This is useful if you have saved the prompt as a global prompt. More info about global prompts here.
• Add the full prompt by typing ai:prompt in the spreadsheet cell. Make sure you replace prompt with the actual prompt text, as you’ll see below.

Notes on referencing specific titles for context:

• You can incorporate variables in your prompts to reference specific fields. For example, to reference the Content field/column, type $Content$; to reference the Title field/column, type $Title$.
• You can also incorporate field keys like $post_title$, $post_content$, etc. (You can view column keys by right-clicking on the column name > Show column key).

Now you can generate excerpts using artificial intelligence. There are at least two options to generate the excerpts:

• Summarizing post content in a certain number of sentences
• Summarizing post content in a certain number of words

a) Summarize the content in a number of sentences

If you want to auto summarize the post content in a certain number of sentences, you need to add a prompt like this in the spreadsheet cells of the Excerpt column:

ai:summarize the $Content$ in 3 sentences

Note. You can customize this prompt for a different number of sentences.

Once you hit Enter, the AI will start working to auto summarize the post content in the selected number of sentences. You’ll see a loading icon in the cell while the AI is completing the task.

As you can see below, we have summarized the post content to generate a 3-sentence post excerpt.

b) Summarize the content in a number of words

If you don’t want to summarize the content of your post in a number of sentences, but in a specific number of words, you can easily do it using a simple prompt like this one:

ai:summarize the $Content$ in 30 words

Note. You can customize this prompt.

Now the AI will start working and generating the post excerpts by auto summarizing your post content. You’ll see a loading icon while the AI is working.

Once the post excerpt has been generated, you’ll see the result in the cell.

c) Generating excerpts in multiple cells at once

Whether you are generating excerpts based on words or sentences, you can paste the prompt into multiple cells of the spreadsheet to generate multiple prompts at once.

This works both for full prompts or for prompt shortcuts.

Once you’re done generating post excerpts using generative AI, you need to Save the changes.

Option 2 – Bulk generate post excerpts

One of the great advantages of WP Sheet Editor – AI is that you can take advantage of all the features of WP Sheet Editor.

You can save time using the Bulk Edit tool, which allows you to edit any field in hundreds or thousands of posts at the same time.

In this case, the Bulk Edit tool allows you to bulk generate post excerpts using AI for hundreds of posts.

For this example, we have filtered all the posts missing excerpt. After filtering the posts you want to edit, you need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

The AI bulk editor allows you to use full prompts or global pre-saved prompts.

Example 1: Using a complete prompt in bulk

Select these values in order to bulk write post excerpts by summarizing post content:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search
• What field do you want to edit: Excerpt
• Select type of edit: AI Prompt
• AI Provider: If you have set up multiple providers, you can select your provider and model using this dropdown.
• Prompt: Here you need to add the full prompt. You can use any of these prompts, for example:

  • Summarize the $post_content$ in 30 words

  • Summarize the $post_content$ in 2 sentences

• You can click on the Show preview button, and you’ll see a preview before saving the changes.
• Once you’re ready, click on Execute Now.

Example 1: Using a global prompt in bulk

WP Sheet Editor – AI allows you to create a bank of AI prompts by saving your prompts to reuse them in the spreadsheet cells, the AI chat, the bulk edit tool, and the Add rows with AI tool. And you can use these global prompts in the Bulk Edit tool.

Select these values in order to bulk generate post excerpts by summarizing post content:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search
• What field do you want to edit: Excerpt
• Select type of edit: Depending on the name you have assigned to your global prompt, this dropdown will display all the global prompts like AI command: Prompt name. For example, we have saved a prompt called Excerpt sentences, so the dropdown shows this: AI command: Excerpt sentences.
• AI Provider: If you have set up multiple providers, you can select your provider and model using this dropdown.
• You can click on the Show preview button, and you’ll see a preview before saving the changes.
• Once you’re ready, click on Execute Now.

This is how you can generate auto excerpts from post content on WordPress. Through the power of AI, you will be able to write hundreds or thousands of post excerpts automatically with a few clicks. And that’s not all, because with WP Sheet Editor – AI, you can generate featured images, post content, optimize SEO metadata, etc.