The Future of SEO When Agents Replace Website Visitors

0:00Brian Alvey: The Voices of Search podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast and I Hear Everything production. In this podcast, we'll share the news, knowledge, and strategies you need to navigate the ever-changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.

0:41Brian Alvey: Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton. Fewer than 50 % of all HTML page requests on the web come from a human. For a head of SEO, that means your website is increasingly being consumed by machines as well as humans it was originally built to serve. 20 years of SEO machinery was built to move a person from search results to a page. So what does a website need to do when you're looking at the visitor as an agent acting as the person? My name is Tyson and joining me today is Brian Alvey, Chief Technology Officer at WordPress VIP, the enterprise WordPress platform behind sites like NASA and News Corp.

1:20I wanted to have the conversation with you to one, bring kind of like a different perspective. And it's like, one, I think you're in a unique position where you're working with some of the larger, like more substantial websites. We know that WordPress is still the, correct me if I'm wrong, I think almost over 40 % of like the open webs suspected to be or like is on WordPress. Is that correct? Yeah, it's kind of hard to calculate. But if you look at ones where you can identify a CMS, we're way more than that. So I think like one, just with that background, that perspective, I think it's interesting for us as SEOs to then understand too, like, how are you thinking about the development and as your products progressing, how does that kind of fit in with the world that we're living in an SEO?

2:10Yeah, so thanks for having me. And I think, yes, this is probably going to be a different, this is not an SEO, like I'm not an SEO person. I don't live in that world. But I look at SEO as part of the sort of customer journey. And when we're looking at building websites for people who are building software for people who have websites, which is hopefully every business, right? Each of them has a different customer journey shape. So media companies, marketers, commerce have three radically different customer journey shapes. And if you think of where does SEO fit into that picture, if you're building tools to optimize the things that business owners do, one of them is getting people to their website.

2:44And so SEO has been that part of the customer journey, the sort of top of funnel for a long, long time. And so it's a very important thing, right? Getting people in the door. Everything else you do is also very important, but it's changing a lot. These customer journeys are changing a lot, completely disrupted by AI and not like AI has many different things, right? AI is how you write now. AI is how you, you know, it's a lot of different things, but it's also, So it's completely changed these customer journeys. And so what hasn't changed is like what you make and who you make it for. So if you're Nike, you make sneakers.

3:19If you're WordPress, you make CMS software, right? Mattress companies make mattresses, et cetera. But everything else about your business is completely changing with AI. And so you have to look at that top of funnel where SEO used to live and say, search used to put people maybe 10 % further down the customer journey, like get them to my door. but AI, the chats, the new version of search, agentic search, those things are actually doing 90 % of the work now. They're sending you all the way to the end. Like they've already picked the car they're going to buy. They've already made the decisions. They've already done all this stuff.

3:51So those three shapes of media companies, marketers, and commerce are just completely eaten up. You know, software ate the world, but AI is eating customer journeys. And with that too, So one from like the website side you have, and largely we've been like going down this mantra of like design for the human design for the user. And so it's like, yeah, you're not chasing Google. You're chasing that user. Now that we're in this world where, like you said, some of that content information is surfaced in an LLM, some other sort of chat experience. and then you're still like, you know, eventually hoping to get that person through the site.

4:35But like, how are you kind of viewing it from like the product perspective as far as like, is this being consumed within the domain or is it being consumed outside of, you know, the four walls of the site? Yeah, it's all new rules is kind of the, you know, the simple way to put it. But when you talk about designing for humans, I would say that we've said that, right? SEO, you know, build the right site for the humans and SEO will take care of everything else, right? Trust Google to know that I'm the right site for this thing and get people to my door. But you've got to admit, we've spent two decades building websites for Google.

5:15We don't really build websites for people. Think of all the work you do, the checklist, the, did I get my tags right? How's my headline looking? Have I done this? Have I submitted it to here? have I rebuilt my sitemap, have I done it? Like, it was a Yoast installed, right? Like, all of this stuff that we've done, we spend an extraordinary amount of time, even in the software products we use to make websites work, in building websites for Google. And that's kind of the old world, right? Like, ranking high and Google and all this stuff and getting 10 blue links on the page, and I'll get some traffic based on that, right?

5:47That whole thing is the old world. The new world is nothing at all like that. And the way you do it doesn't work the same way. So I'm not saying throw out building the right websites for humans. At the end of the day, if I sell minivans, you know, I want people to buy mine instead of somebody else's. And at the end of the day, a human buys something. And those three customer journeys I talked about, the reason that they're different shapes is because of where buying happens, right? Like none of these businesses, every business has to sell something. Otherwise you're just a hobby or a charity, right?

6:17So at some point somebody buys something. So if you're a commerce, like a store, Zappos, sneaker store, right? Amazon, whatever you are, Walmart, Tesco, a person goes to your site, fills a shopping cart, buys something. That's kind of the purest business, right? I have a thing to sell. You come and you buy it. There's one customer journey shape there. If I'm a marketer, the transaction doesn't happen on my website. So I'm Salesforce. I sell software, but I don't sell it on my website. I talk about it. I warm you up. I'm the middle part of the buying journey, right? WordPress VIP. We don't sell our CMS on the site.

6:47We have massive, massive customers paying a lot of money. You can't just put a credit card on our website and like host NASA, right? Like you just, there's no, you know, the credit card will get rejected. Anyway, it's kind of a funny thing, a different buying journey, right? And then media companies, like the content is the product. There is no transaction. They're literally showing you stories, sports scores, whatever the thing, the game recap, politics, opinion, something. And they're showing you an ad and like six hops later, you're buying sneakers. You're actually doing a transaction. So there are really weird thing far away from transactions.

7:19Commerce is right at the transaction. These marketers are kind of in the middle. And if you look at all of those things and how you have to optimize your business for that, I think at the end of the day, you still want a human buys something, right? Like that's got to happen. But the how much of that takes place on your website is destroyed. So I don't spend hours and hours looking at different minivans and doing a configurator and some kind of a glossy thing and a comparator and photos and like a 360 view and like, okay, what does it look like with two dogs and three kids in this car, right? Like these kinds of visualizers, that's for the human to buy.

7:51All of that goes away. Now it's, I go to chat GBT, I go to Claude, I go to whatever my thing is. I ask Muse. I've got all these different ways. And I'm like, I need a new car. And it goes, well, I know a lot about you. I know how many kids you have. I know what pets you have. I know how far you drive. I'm the phone in your pocket. I'm watching you all day long and I'm listening to you, right? I know all of this stuff. So I'm going to, I now have to, I'm sorry, I, the chat. So the chat, this bot now has to be the ultimate car salesman. You know, like literally what would a car salesperson do on a lot?

8:23Size you up, think about yourself, ask you questions and get you to a car to sell you that car. If I'm Toyota, I have to now make a website that isn't for humans anymore, that trains these bots to be the best Toyota salespeople that we've ever seen. And I have to teach it that if somebody comes in and has these questions, here are the next three things to ask. Here are qualifying questions. That whole process is not a glossy slideshow, a photo gallery, SEO tricks to try to get people in the door if you type minivan, but you spell it wrong. All the old, you know, voodoo and tricks and crap, right?

8:57Right. This whole thing is now I have to now think of how do I make chatbots the world's best car salesperson? And what they're going to do is size you up and then they're going to get to a point where you've like run out of things to say. And the chatbot has to say, would you like me to find you a dealership in your area where you can take a test drive? That's like, that's the next question it should ask you. Or would you like to look at trucks instead? You know, or would you like to look at something else? And so that's the job of the website now is to train that. And when you think like, well, that's true.

9:27If thoughts are the only way these things are being sold, maybe it's 2 % of the time right now. Maybe it's 3%. Someday it will be 100%. If you think back to when the web came out, right, there was offline, then online, and now there's AI. So the offline to online transition, at some point, Nike's website was like the 19th most important marketing channel for Nike. They're like, oh, the web, that's never going to be a thing. It's really small. We'll put a tiny team on that. and now it's the number one thing, right? Same thing with mobile. For a while, people are like, mobile, that's like 5%, 10 % of my traffic.

10:02The screens suck. You can't show an ad on there anyway. I'll just put the content up, no ads. Now, okay, mobile's 80%, 90 % of my traffic. These websites are littered with ads. The phone is unusable. So everything that was not important and was like, oh, AI is like 2 % of my traffic, let's plan on it being 100%. And if it only hits 50%, it's still a good thing that you prepared for it. And I was right. Now, how, and I know this is kind of like out on a limb extrapolating, but like, how fast do you see that transition happening? Because you're right, like, as it is today, like, we're seeing the increase and it's, you know, it's growing very rapidly.

10:45But still, it's like, you don't have as many transactions taking place by agents. and you still have some like early stages of that transformation, how fast would you just personally expect that to move? Like if you're preparing, whether you're in-house or kind of working with a company, like how fast do you think people need to be prepared for that? So I think, well, so I can't tell you. It's two years from now, 80 % of all, you know, whatever, Toyota, you know, minivan transactions will be agentic, right? But I can tell you it's faster than anyone expects. And I can tell you that nobody's moving fast enough.

11:23So when I visit companies all over the planet and I watch them do digital transformation projects called the future of whatever, I'm like, okay, that's cute, but that's like, it's like a 3 % shift. They're not going fast enough. They need a 300 % shift. And when you think about, if you're asking me like, well, when will this be, when will it be like 100 % or 80 % of all of your surfing is done by bots? I think it's going to come faster than you expect because it's not about people going out and downloading, you know, Perplexity's browser or somebody's browser or something like that. It's actually going to come to your browser.

11:56So very soon, Chrome will just take a website and redo it for you and personalize it for you. It's just going to do it. It's just going to be, do you want the enhanced version of the web experience? And everybody's going to say yes. On Facebook, do I want to go to a site or do I want to have the site read to me by a bot and things shopped for, you know, shopped for me? So I think it's going to just come to your products. You're not going to go seek these things out. You know, people in the middle of nowhere, you know, people not in Silicon Valley, right? You know, no offense. Like people not in Silicon Valley who aren't on the cutting edge, who aren't like, you know, 24-7 running, you know, a Mac Mini with OpenClaw and all this stuff, right?

12:31It's not like they're going to take 10 years to get here. It's going to come to them in two. So I think the shift is going to happen faster than you expect. And I don't think companies are going fast enough preparing for it. And again, if you, like you just said, you know, something about like being very forward thinking or futuristic or something like that. And like I try to live in like, let's just follow this to the extreme, right? What if it does get to 100 %? What should we be doing? And okay, if it only gets to 80 % or 50%, you still did the right thing preparing for it because it's thinking like it's going to be at 20 % forever or 2 % forever is not going to work.

13:08and like with that from then like your planning and like the products from like your side is that something like is that having a significant impact in how you're developing your guys's product so it really is and i think we're i'd say we're i say our company is doing two things right that i see a lot of companies not do right uh one of them was just uh we did this ai enablement training. So I think a lot of companies are slow to adopt, right? You'll have the top people, the fastest people are going to like 10X and like go full in on AI. But the people who aren't maybe early adopters like this or aren't in, you know, they're not on the engineering team, but they're in marketing or they're in sales or they're in support or something else.

13:52They're not going fast enough. And so you have this problem where like the ceiling gets raised for talent at your company and speed based on AI and all that, but the floor doesn't get raised, right? And so I think the businesses that go and raise the floor and fly people in, you know, we have an office in New York City that we like, we're all over the country, all over the planet, our entire company, right? 1500 people all over the planet. But we'd fly 40, 50, 80 people at a time into New York for two weeks of AI enablement training to make sure that like they all have it. I don't see a lot of companies doing that.

14:23So that's one thing. And then the second is, I think the other thing that businesses need to do that we're starting to do really well is keep the current business going. Like that's not going away, right? The thing you used to do that got you here isn't going away, but you've got to jump on that next thing like really hard. And when I look at a lot of businesses, I think they're just trying to, like I said, like iterate their old stuff and hope it gets to the new thing. And one of the things that we're doing is we have this whole like WordPress hosting platform. That's our past 20 something years of WordPress.

14:53We scale it better than anybody. The biggest and most important WordPress websites on earth run on VIP, right? Like you said, NASA, the White House, Salesforce, banks, like giant media companies, global companies, right? Big companies. At the same time, we know that the future probably isn't you sitting in a browser, like you're at a typewriter, like with an empty sheet of paper, just like typing from your mind, right? Like just, I'll just sit here and type like I'm in the 50s. Like that's not going to happen, right? What's going to happen is the whole agentic future, which is I talk to bots who build the software to change my website.

15:28And I talk to bots who update the content to change my website. And really the difference between those two, it used to be the reason CMSs exist is because non-developers have to change the website. Not everybody knows how to code. So I'm going to build you a CMS where you can go in, like my grandmother can go in, like type a title, drag in a photo, type a couple of words and hit publish. Any fool can do that, right? Anybody of any skill level can do that. That was for non-coders. But the future is we all talk to bots. now actually everybody can code and now actually everybody can make great content.

15:58So how do you transform that experience from, I go to a browser to sit in a blank sheet, like I'm at a typewriter and type to, it knows what I need to write. It has the details. It's done the research. It suggests things to me. I work back and forth with it. It's the world's best writing coach. And so I think we're looking at how do you do agentic hosting, agentic authoring at the same time as like, keep your existing business going. Get the New York Post out every day. Get the UK Sun out every day. Get the Sunday Times. Like publish your stuff as is. But what is the future experience for those teams and how can they move faster and how can they adopt this thing?

16:33And so that's, I'd say the two things that Automatic and WordPress VIP are doing well, which is raising that floor at the same time we raise the ceiling. And then looking at like, how do we keep the existing platform going, but launch something like SpaceFast, which is agentic hosting and agentic, agentic, agentic. So we live in interesting times. Now that makes a lot of sense in the framework where it's like, yeah, you can't forget the like what needs to go out the door today. But like from the bringing the floor up, it almost sounds like from in your guys' placement, it's twofold, one internally, but then also like with the client base because how they're interacting and using and developing their websites on the product is going to be hand in hand.

17:20So it's like, is a lot of that like bringing the floor like both external and internal or like how do you do that? Maybe you can see the pain on my face as you're asking that question because I don't know how much influence we have over them. I mean, we can show them the way. They're, you know, I just wish what you're asking was like as easy as it sounds, right? Like, can't you just show them the way? And so I think our platforms can do that. But if our platform suddenly went from a WordPress, like WP admin, like typewriter screen, you know, the block editor into like, it looks like Discord or Slack, or your phone asks you a question and like, wait, this is how I'm writing a story now?

18:02This is weird. Or it talks to you. Like they would be freaked out. They would not be able to work. Like we would think we're pulling them into like the speedy, speed of light, agentic future, and they would just be paralyzed. Okay, so you can't do that. And we can't, we can't, you know, we have, so we have shared our playbook for the AI enablement meetups, right? So we have had some companies who've said, look, we need to do this. We know we need to do this, but we just don't know how. And we said, oh, we fly people into New York. We have a whole two week program. We have like a whole like course outline agenda.

18:36Like there's a, there's a schedule. And they go, can you just share that with us? So we've shared that with them. But it's not 80 % of our customers have asked for that. And I don't know that we can do that. We're not like an agentic bootcamp for businesses. I think we influence them in more subtle ways. I wish we could do that. I wish we could slide them into our thing and have them go through that and just say, look, this is the future, get ready for it. Because I'll tell you in these AI enablement shops, if you think of the most like AI-pilled person in your company and the least AI-pilled or whatever, they're, the most AI-filled ones like already use these tools all day long.

19:14They know all the things they can automate in their lives. They know all the things that they can speed up, all the shortcuts, everything. The other people, when they see some of these things, you show them like, here's how you do a prompt. Here's what you get back. Here's how you ask it to do a better job, whatever. And then you go, now let me show you how to generate an image. And they go, oh my God, you can make images just by talking to a chat thing? And they're like, oh God, how did, you know, You're so far behind, right? So there's a massive gap between these crazy early adopters, the Silicon Valley crowd that's in this heart of this thing.

19:46And I'm not even inside Anthropic or something. Imagine you're inside Anthropic. You have unlimited tokens. You're three models ahead of the rest of the world in terms of frontier models, right? You have everything. There's so many people so far behind that. And then there's a chart on Twitter that shows, it was this really cool post on X with, it was like, it was the whole population of earth. It was like a 20 by 20 grid of squares and like 80 something, 86 % of it was just gray. They don't use AI at all. They're not doing this all. And then there was like, I don't know, 12 squares that were green that are people who like pay$20 a month for cursor or clod or chat GPT or something.

20:23It's a product they use. And then there's like a couple of yellow squares of people who like, okay, they, they, they, they do more than that. And there's like one red square of the people who are like super crazy futuristic AI people. And I just feel like we talk, like you and I are going to talk about that. And so many people are just in the gray, just nowhere. They don't even know this is coming. They have no idea. And it'll get to them through Facebook, you know, weirdly enough. Fair. I feel like one thing that we're kind of like hitting around too is like AI content then. because it's like sounds like with if i'm reading kind of between the lines in this like future world like if we're moving away from that typewriter experience inherently it will have a form within that it's and hopefully we're close to putting this one to bed but like it has been a topic in the seo community does google like ai content is it and you know we've seen the conversations and helpful content updates and things like that.

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23:08So we might be. The bottom line is I would hope that the powers that be, the Googles of the world, will see through this. You know, so you talk about like AI slop, right? So you have a newspaper that maybe could make 600 stories a day with their team. And now they can make 6 ,000 stories a day or 60 ,000. There's just too much. Nobody can read that much. Nobody wants to read that much. Every story goes from being five or six paragraphs to like 40, 50, 80 paragraphs. Even internally at work, right? People write these things and they're like, okay, you didn't write this. A bot wrote this. So just too much content is too much.

23:42Like there is a natural sort of limit to this. Nobody wants 6 ,000, 60 ,000 stories from a newspaper every day. You want 600. 600 is still a lot. I can't read all that. So I think that if you, I hope that Google looks at all this and sees what's good and what's bad and keeps doing a pretty good job of knowing like this site should rank higher, this site shouldn't rank higher. So I hope that happens. I think that there was always slop though. So it's not just like AI slop. I like to talk about one of the, okay, so in the SEO world, like what are the most important things that somebody can write?

24:14Or what do people talk about that are kind of popular? It's like, what time is the Superbowl on? What channels, what, what channels the Emmys on? Right. Like, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like, there's no reason on earth that a seven 11 should be writing a blog post about like, what time is it? What channel is the Superbowl on? They just, none of that matters. I mean, right. Like, or, or, or, you know, whatever, um, just different kinds of businesses that are like hopping on this thing to try to, I don't know, get some drive by traffic. That's not real. That's not good. That's not for your brand.

24:42Like, why I would, you know, they shouldn't be doing that. So there was always a lot of human slop and I trust Google to work that out. I would hope that they can also work through all the AI slop as well. And I just think as people at the end of the day, like unless my bots are reading all this and they don't mind seeing 60 ,000 articles from the local newspaper that I like and they can summarize it for me. But like, what was the point of generating all that content? I don't think it works. If you think of how pruning your site maps, so you just have less but higher quality stuff and you should get rewarded for that, I would hope that the laws of the internet still keep doing that, that they respect you for quality, not quantity.

25:19And the same thing should apply to AI content. I think there's gonna be an interesting shift because in a lot of ways, the barrier on volume was always a production piece and the producing of the information. Now it's like we've reached a stage where it's quicker and easier almost to create than consume. And you see it sometimes within like businesses, like where it's like I could spin up an SOP that's AI generated that's 13 pages long. And it would take someone longer to digest and like understand that than it did for me to create it. So that's happening a lot. So unless I use a bot to summarize this junk thing that you just wrote that's 80 paragraphs full of photos and it's not real.

26:04It's not good. None of that is good. Better is, you know, longer is not better. Makes me think of a couple different things. There's, I don't know, it's interesting times. Just think of what my thought was during your question here.

26:23I had two different thoughts, but I guess I think I liked your, I was just thinking of the fact that I'm like, I'm drowning in this stuff. People are writing things that it's just too much. Yeah. And with that too, though, I feel like, and I would hope that there is that kind of like almost like market correction but is that like a topic for consideration from your side when you're thinking about kind of like overall like infrastructure or like how you're developing the product does like hey people like chance of websites being substantially larger is like now like a more like an easier like more I guess realistic scenario to have?

27:06Is that something that you're preparing for as far as like, hey, we expect there to be an increase of X percent on average pages of our users? So there is definitely this idea that you can make more. And I think it comes out in a few different ways. So one of them is, if you think of GitHub, the code hosting platform, they expected we're going to have a certain number of users, we grow this much per year, users, you know, the users on our product make code. They can go about this fast. So here's how much we're going to increase. And then agentic, you know, the whole agentic thing happened, all the, you know, AI coding happened, vibe coding, whatever you want to call it.

27:45And now it's like, oh, we just went like 30 X. And so they're having problems keeping their platform running because they just didn't think it was going to be flooded like this. So imagine, you know, the same thing happened with Spotify though, for music, right? There's a certain number of bands, they make a certain number of songs, they can upload a certain amount. And it's like, wait, what if every band instead of making, you know, being able to make like five songs a month if they're fast, could make like 50 songs a day and just flood the thing. And it comes back to this, like anything worth gaming will be gamed.

28:15If there's money to be made on Spotify and I can just, I can spend $3 to make$5 on Spotify. I'll do that all day long. I'll spend$3, generate songs, put them up there, spray and pray, hope it happens. Right. So I think you get the same thing on the internet. But, and again, I'm hoping that, you know, the newspaper you love, you know, 600 stories is a lot and they cover everything I need. I don't need 6 ,000 or 60 ,000 stories. So I hope that it doesn't sort of explode like that and become a mess because it's just not useful. And this actually comes back to more of like a fundamental business thing, which is, again, like a Silicon Valley thing.

28:49They've always said like ideas are nothing, execution is everything, right? So we can have a ton of ideas, but like only a few people actually go do the thing. Oh, I thought I want an app that like brings me a taxi on demand. Great. Tons of people thought of that. But like a couple of people did it and they did it well. And I didn't do it. Right. Somebody else did it. So there's always like been that limiting factor of like ideas are free. Execution is expensive. Ideas don't mean anything. Execution means everything. And that's going away because now everybody can execute. So you have a couple of problems that come out of that.

29:21One of them is, okay, so if ideas are free and execution is free, the first thing you run into is every friend of yours who said, I've got like 30 different ideas for companies, man. Like I got so many ideas. I'm just bursting with ideas. I just can't build them all. Then when you give them a magic wand that will build them all, it turns out they had three ideas. They didn't have 30, maybe they had four ideas, but then they run out and they're like, oh, actually all those other ideas, all these other ideas were terrible. Right? So now that you can do them, you realize there weren't that many good ideas in there.

29:49And the other thing is you get overwhelmed because now I'm not deciding to do something like, which takes, you know, let's say 15, 20 minutes and then working on it for four hours and then making another decision and then working again, I'm deciding it's happening instantly and I have to decide again. So now I'm drowning in this, like this, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm exhausted from making decisions. So I will actually, if I, you know, if I used to code for, let's say eight hours, I was a certain level of tired. But if I code for four hours with a bunch of bots running, I feel like I'm a hundred times more tired than I was because of all the decision making.

30:26So this weird move from ideas are free, execution is expensive, to ideas are free, execution is free, changes everything, changes humans, changes how you work, like me coding, how I work, how exhausted I am after a few hours. And then the other thing it does too is you look at things like somebody just recreated the entire Adobe suite, right? You saw that. They're just like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, everything like screen by screen. They didn't go into every single screen. They like had one bot look at another bot opening screens. So they didn't do every little panel, every little thing.

30:59So it's not like they did it a hundred percent, but they did 50%, 70%. Like you don't need to have Adobe software. It's kind of weird. Okay. So ideas are free. Execution is free. What's your, what protects your brand? Like if I can just rip off all the Adobe software. If I can, you know, what protects your brand is now sort of patents, intellectual property, legal protections. So you say, I'm sorry, Adobe software is patented, or, you know, this thing's copyrighted, this thing's trademarked. You can't do these things. So the legal protections are your thing. So ideas are free, execution is free.

31:31But the reason my business survives this weird onslaught where you can just recreate my business with code with a, you know, coding agent is the legal protections. And if you think about that, that's already true with something like, I can make a Batman movie. I can make the best Batman movie. It's gonna be amazing. I can't put it in theaters. I can't show it because I'll get sued, right? So there's a protection there. What goes wrong is when the world votes to say they don't care about those protections. So if you think about Napster, right, there are laws about like sharing, you know, music.

32:05You're not allowed to just steal CDs and give them to your friend or rip things or whatever, burn things, Well, the whole world said, I don't really care if Bruce Springsteen gets another mansion. I want to steal his songs. I want to share them with my friends. I think it's cool. I don't care about copyright law, trademarks, anything. And so when the world, as long as the world says, I think Adobe should be protected, then Adobe's fine. But the second the world says, I don't really care. I just want free Photoshop. Adobe's in trouble. So this weird move from ideas are free, execution is very expensive.

32:36when that changes ideas are free execution is free what's left to defend businesses is this collective idea that we think businesses are should be allowed to survive that's the law and well like similar to that point like too what's your stance on like what access you're granting agents to your content because you've had like some interesting like swings of events where it's like, you know, companies suing open AI, they're partnering with open AI. Like, you know, it's like, I've heard everything from, we need to protect our content and gated to, we want everyone to see it so we can increase our likelihood of having that placement.

33:21Like, kind of where do you land there? Yeah. So there's a few different questions in that. Three, I'd say. So one is personally, I think very carefully about who am I trusting with things? What if my Mac Mini over there, he used to be downstairs. Now he's on the table over here. What he has access to, right? Like that's crazy, right? Like you have to not, you can't give everything. It wants everything, right? Does Muse get access to everything? It already knows my Facebook stuff, right? So I personally have a lot of decisions to make there. Business-wise, the companies that we work with have a variety of opinions.

33:57And I often joke, like one of them hates perplexity and they're suing perplexity, but they love Anthropic and they love OpenAI. Another one, suing OpenAI loves perplexity, loves their browser, loves all this stuff, right? So you can't, there is no one size fits all solution for when you're a platform to say, like, these are the good LLMs and these are the bad ones. You just have to be a platform like ours. It gives you ultimate control. So you say, we hate OpenAI, block them. Now we've done a deal with them. Turn it on, give them all the content, right? So that I think is, you have to have the flexibility, able to be the levers among the relationships to be able to represent the wild variety of love and hate that's out there for the LLMs and these big powers that be, right?

34:39So that's another big thing. And so I just, you know, I think personally, a lot of decisions to be made, business-wise, a lot of decisions to be made about who you let in or who you don't. Then there's a whole other thing, which is I can tell you which companies want to turn those those relationships off and, you know, like close the content, protect the content or not. And it goes back to those sort of like media marketers and commerce. If you are marketers or commerce, you are very, you're very close to the sale. You will do everything to get your content, which only exists to sell your stuff into the hands of LLMs, into SEO, into LLMs, you name it, right?

35:15You want to show up in search. You want to show your car, your mattress, you want to sell those things, your sneakers, whatever your things are. So we have, I'd say, half of the businesses we work with are running towards LLMs and saying, like, please make my stuff rank. Please make it show up. The other half, and this is not the same as it was in the SEO days, the other half, the media companies where the content is the product, they're saying, I don't want to put my content into there because I don't show any ads and I'm out of business, right? So we have a very interesting sort of split between businesses running towards LLMs or businesses running away from LLMs that want the shields up, protect them, don't let them scrape my site.

35:54And the other ones are like, please let them scrape my site harder and faster. So it's a funny thing to look at, but that goes back to your sort of business. Like, who are you? What do you sell? How close are you to a transaction? Is content your product or is a product your product? And depending on how you answer that question, I completely understand the fear of LLMs or the like lust for LLMs. Well, and it also brings us back kind of to where we started the conversation where you're tying in like the overall kind of like buyer's journey or business model into how you're approaching like the overall website build.

36:32And so I think it is also fitting that how you're going to view or want that interaction point will carry forward in the same way. now i want to be respectful of time and i do have a few lightning round questions to throw your way so with these i'm going to throw kind of a variety of different questions towards you with a little more short form in nature ready for that i will try to be quick all good so first one i have for you what's one thing that doesn't change when search traffic goes to zero one thing that doesn't change when search traffic goes to zero. I think, again, the what you make and who you make it for doesn't change, but the how you get it to them, everything else about the relationship, the customer journey, completely, completely disrupted.

37:20So it's not, the one thing that doesn't change is I make sneakers and I sell them to people who have feet. I make cars, I sell them to people who drive. Like whatever the thing is, that doesn't change. That's the only thing that doesn't change. Everything else out the window. And in some ways too, you could like make the argument of like, what we're really kind of talking maybe like it's not zero search because regardless where they are conducting it like that search is still taking place like and if you look at studies like more and more people are searching you are just using a variety of different mediums for that search and so like yeah you're going to see changing behaviors as far as your website traffic goes but that doesn't mean the consumer behavior of seeking that information or going to various search engines.

38:08It's like the arena is just changing a little bit. Yeah, 100%. People need sneakers. People are going to buy sneakers. That doesn't change. The whole rest of it is gone. Yes. So next one I have for you. Does vibe coding kill the need for a CMS? Yes and no. And the yes part is, if you're making a six-page website and it's just for you, you're making a 60-page website and you're the only person working on it, vibe code that. You can still use WordPress for that, a CMS, whatever, but you can vibe code that and you can get away with that. You can tell your bot to update the copyright statement or whatever the thing is you need to do, right?

38:43Or put a new post. But if you are running a massive store, or if you are running a high-end newsroom, you are not vibe coding workflow software for 1 ,000-person teams getting out a daily newspaper. That's just not going to happen. Maybe you can two, three, four, five years from now. I don't think it's going to happen that way. Think of anything you vibe-coded. The second you need somebody else to work on it with you, you're kind of screwed. You're like, oh, God, I wish I had a login screen and a user's table and whatever. I should just have a CMS. And you can use a vibe-code to tell it to make a WordPress site.

39:18It just works. You have a working CMS. there's no reason to have to vibe code all that extra scaffolding and stuff that you get. So I think on the low end for like a, you know, I think you can vibe code those. Actually, it's kind of one of the bets of our company with this like space fast, authentic hosting platform, vibe, go to think, make a three page website, make a one page slideshow report thing, but you need somewhere to put it. It doesn't need to be in the CMS. Nobody else is editing it. Great. We have a solution for that too. So I think the answer is yes, it vibe coding can eat up the bottom end, the one person stuff, the one page stuff, but I don't think I need the top end yet.

39:51Next one I have, five years from now, will optimizing websites for AI agents be more important than optimizing for Google? Five months from now, optimizing for the bots will be more important than optimizing for Google. And the reason is because the bots will be in everything. You just won't be able to stop it. You're not going to seek out. You're not going to go download a weird AI browser. Chrome and Safari are just going to do it for you. Next one I got, Matt, can you really flip a switch for 40 % of the web? That's a good question. So a lot of people think that, right? People are like, oh my gosh, this one guy controls, you know, not me, but Matt, controls 40 % of the web.

40:32And that's like indirectly true. It's not true. We host less than 1%, right? At our own company. So we build WordPress, automatic builds WordPress and invests a lot in WordPress and gives it away to everybody. So there are other hosting companies bigger than us that are out there selling a lot of WordPress. So we can't just make a change and then all of a sudden, like let's say we wanted to put everything in dark mode. That would work for a very small portion of the web. And even then, our customers have total control. We wouldn't even be able to do that on our own customers. So no, we can influence those things.

41:05So the longer answer to your lightning question is we can work standards into these things. We can create an abilities API that can now surface what your site can do so MCP works better, right? We can do things with web standards that make sites running on WordPress better at having robots.txt, having accessibility, being good for screen readers. Like we can influence the web, but we can't flip a switch and change things. Yeah, it's more of like influencing with the carrot versus the stick. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Attract people to going down this path, but at the end of the day, there's still some limits to it.

41:42Brian Alvey: Correct. Last one I have for you. What's one lesson from building early web publishing networks that still matters for AI search today? The good answer for the lightning thing, good way to end this, is that trusted brands matter. So when I've built networks, I think of things like, you know, the shared code, the shared design systems, or certain things about building a network of sites that matter. I think what really matters is who are the people behind this? Do I trust them? And then does Google and do the future AI search services understand that as a consumer, I would much rather see Wired said this thing than a site I've never heard of.

42:23I'd much rather see, you know, NASA says this about space, not, you know, Joe's little scammy space blog running AdSense, right? That's the thing. I think that building a trusted brand, having a relationship with the audience, there are sites that we, I'm not not sites, sites are only 20, 30 years old. There are publications we work with that are 100 years old, 150 years old, 220 years old. New York Post was created by Alexander Hamilton. We work with The Spectator in the UK. They have like a basement library showing like magazines or newspapers, whatever their format is from like more than 100 years ago, 180 years ago.

43:01these are really long, long lived brands. And the point there is somebody trusts that brand. They love that. I would hope that those are the things that show up in the rankings, um, that they're the right things and that these platforms do the right thing. A hundred percent. And I think too, going back earlier in the conversation where in a world where the table stakes are rising and the barriers to content creation or the other things are getting smaller and smaller, authority still will remain. And I'm like, I would be placing the bet too that we're going to see that authority aspect having a growing significance.

43:45We've already seen the signs, but as it further matures, you're going to have more and more and more and more and more content out there. how to use that. Yeah, there's a lot of noise. And I think, yeah, authority will be a key piece of that aspect. Well, with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Brian Aue, Chief Technology Officer at WordPress VIP. And if you'd like to get in touch with Brian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes, or you can go on over and check out his company's website.

44:21And if you haven't subscribed yet and you'd like a daily stream of AI search strategy in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button on your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed in the following days. That's all for today's episode. Thanks for stopping by and we will see you in the next one.