Adding a visible AI label under images in WordPress

Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026. Anyone publishing AI-generated or AI-edited images on a website must label them so visitors can clearly recognise their origin. The European Commission’s guidelines state that this requires a perceivable element – a visible label – and that operators cannot rely on machine-readable metadata alone. This article shows what such a label looks like in WordPress and how IMG Performer sets it automatically.

What the law actually requires

As a website operator you are a “deployer” under the AI Act. Your obligation under Article 50(4): the disclosure must be understandable and perceivable by people. A note that only a machine reads in the file header is not enough. A visible indicator on the image – a small badge reading “AI-generated”, for example – meets this obligation directly. A watermark burned into the pixels is not required by law.

The manual route

Without a plugin you would have to handle every affected image individually: add a caption or build a CSS overlay that fits every image size and every theme. That is laborious, hard to keep track of and often lost when you switch themes. For a grown media library this route is not practical.

How IMG Performer sets the label

IMG Performer checks every image on upload for provenance data: embedded C2PA manifests (which DALL-E 3, Adobe Firefly or Google Imagen include) and EXIF/XMP signatures of known AI tools. If it detects an AI image, it assigns the category “AI-generated” or “AI-edited” and automatically shows a visible badge on the front end – on the image, across all image sizes. The badge can be switched off, and the Pro version lets you set your own icon instead of the default pill.

Not every AI tool leaves readable provenance data – Midjourney, for instance, provides none as of 2026. For those cases the media library offers manual classification: you pick the status yourself, and the badge is then set exactly as with automatic detection.

Routes to a visible AI label compared

Route	Detection	Visible label	Across all image sizes	Also image optimization & alt text
Manual via CSS / caption	–	yes, per image by hand	only with effort	no
Klarvo AI Transparency	via active plugins, not the image	yes	yes	no
SEO’n’AI – AI Image check&mark	on the image: IPTC/C2PA (detected and written automatically)	yes	yes	no
IMG Performer	on the image: C2PA + metadata, plus manual	yes, automatic	yes	yes

One exception among WordPress plugins: SEO’n’AI – AI Image check&mark also detects and writes IPTC/C2PA provenance data, but remains a pure labelling tool without image optimization, alt text, or a retroactive media library scan.

Disclaimer

As of September 2026. This article is context on the legal situation, not legal advice. The regulation text and the European Commission’s guidelines are authoritative.