WordPress.org featured my plugin. Nobody has published what that actually does, so I'm going to.

I build an AI search plugin for WordPress. One person, no funding, small.

Last week WordPress.org put it in the Featured tab. That is the tab that opens by default when you click Plugins → Add New, on every WordPress install. Eight plugins at a time, rotating every two weeks.

The part that surprised me: there is no application form and no fee. Every eligible plugin sits in the pool automatically and someone at WordPress.org picks eight. You cannot buy your way in. I found out the same way everyone else does, by looking.

Then I went looking for prior art. The programme has been running since March, dozens of plugins have been through it, and I could not find a single author who had published what it did to their numbers. The curator posted figures for the first cohort in March and said more would follow. There was no second report. Someone asked publicly for a list of previously featured plugins and the question sat there unanswered.

So there is a distribution channel that a lot of small WordPress developers wonder about, and no honest first-hand account of what it is worth.

I recorded my baseline before the rotation started. Every day I am logging downloads, active installs, signups, and how many of those people ever run a search. That last number is the one I actually care about, because installs are easy and usage is not.

One thing I have already found that I do not think is documented anywhere: the order of the eight plugins in the tab is reshuffled every day. Same eight, different sequence. So position in that list is a draw, not a ranking. Which incidentally hands me a free randomised experiment on whether position matters at all.

I will publish the whole thing when the fortnight ends. Including if the answer is "not much", which is a real possibility.