What problem does this address?

As AI-powered content tools become more common in WordPress, site owners have no standardized way to define their editorial identity, content rules, and brand voice in a machine-readable format.

Today, if a site owner wants to maintain consistency across multiple content creators or AI tools, they must rely on external documents, tribal knowledge, or ad hoc solutions. There is no structured, in-WordPress system for:

• Documenting brand voice, tone, and copy rules
• Defining per-block content guidelines (e.g., heading structure, paragraph length, image alt text rules)
• Providing a single source of truth that both humans and AI tools can reference
• Importing/exporting editorial guidelines between sites

While theme.json defines how a site looks, there is no equivalent for how a site sounds and how content should be created. This gap becomes more significant as AI writing assistants integrate with WordPress and need to respect site-specific editorial standards.

What is your proposed solution?

Introduce Content Guidelines as an experimental feature in Gutenberg — a persistent, structured system for encoding editorial rules, brand voice, and content standards into WordPress.

The idea is to provide a settings-based UI where site owners can define guidelines across customizable categories (e.g., copy/tone, images, site context, block-specific rules). These guidelines would be stored as a custom post type with revision history, exposed via REST API, and extensible through PHP filters — allowing any plugin (SEO, AI, editorial workflow) to read and build on them.

Think of it as the content counterpart to Global Styles: where Global Styles standardize a site's visual identity, Content Guidelines standardize its editorial identity.

Key capabilities

• Guideline categories: Copy, images, site context, block-specific rules, and a catch-all for custom needs
• Block-specific rules: Per-block-type guidelines (e.g., rules for core/heading, core/paragraph, core/image)
• Revision history: Built on CPT revisions for audit and rollback
• Import/Export: JSON-based portability between sites
• Experimental: Gated behind Gutenberg experiment flag, no impact when disabled

Related

• Technical Discussion - Content Guidelines: Technical Architecture Discussion #75258
• Design Discussion - Content Guidelines: UI/UX Design Discussion #75260
• Draft exploration PR: Add Content Guidelines experimental feature #74789
• MVP exploration - Content Guidelines: Add experimental REST API and custom post type #75164