Brian Alvey

Publishers can see the clicks AI sends them.

They can’t see the answers it builds without them.

The next big breakthrough for publishers won’t be another AI model. It will be a Search Console for AI.

Comscore’s new AI Intelligence Report shows how quickly discovery is fragmenting. Between January and June, ChatGPT’s share of AI prompt volume fell from 70% to 50% while Gemini and Claude gained.

Optimizing for a single model is already a losing strategy. Yet publishers still can’t see what happens between someone’s prompt and an AI-generated answer.

Measurement is the blind spot. A publisher’s website and CMS provide a durable foundation for AI discoverability, but your site analytics show only the people who click. They don’t show the prompts, impressions, mentions, and citations that don’t get clicked.

Google has begun closing that gap. Its new generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. But it still doesn’t show clicks, click-through rates, the queries that triggered an appearance, or where your citation appeared within an answer.

Publishers need that information.

Will one great AI console solve the problem?

No.

The fragmented AI market means publishers will eventually need a unified view across all of the major services. But that view can only be built after each platform exposes the first-party data only it can see.

So keep making your content authoritative, structured, and original. That isn’t just practice. It’s the engine you need.

But today, publishers are still tuning it by ear.

The first AI platform to offer a full dashboard won’t solve cross-platform measurement. But it will set the standard and earn publishers’ trust.

With 10 days left in September, I had used up 96% of my Claude Enterprise tokens.

Oh no!

(I use the enterprise plan because WordPress VIP works with big companies like Salesforce, Meta and Jefferies and government websites like NASA and The White House.)

I tried to look at this as a positive sign. A milestone. I spend so much time talking about using AI at a high level, but I rarely have time to code and I always feel I’m stuck in first gear. Like an imposter. So it was a kind of accomplishment.

But seriously, what was I going to do for those 10 days?

Catch up on podcasts?

Take long walks?

Learn a new language?

Retire?

Fortunately, we had a four-day weekend trip planned to go to the Bourbon & Beyond music festival. It was my first visit to Kentucky and we had a blast, along with more than 200,000 other people. For an event of this magnitude, it was unbelievably well-run. Nice work Danny Wimmer Presents.

We enjoyed every band, but the ones that really amazed me were Lindsey Stirling, Foster the People, Mumford & Sons, Squeeze, Hootie and the Blowfish, Kaitlin Butts, The Verve Pipe, Clover County and Vertical Horizon.

I am now less than 2 hours away from my token usage being reset.

Not enough time for a concert. Maybe I’ll take a long walk.

Search engines have always worked like a mall directory. They showed you where all seven sneaker stores were and how to get there.

Today’s answer engines are more like genies. You need sneakers? They just hand you the sneakers. No listings. No browsing. No shopping. No visits. No clicks.

This is worse news for publishers than it is for marketers and commerce sites. If you’re a car company or pest-control service, the answer agent shortcuts the shopping process, but they still send you a customer who’s ready to buy.

But if you’re a publisher? Your content is the product. How do you make money when the answer engine shortcuts the whole reading journey?

Last week, I talked with Brian Boyle at The Daily Upside about zero-click, GEO, crawler controls, and the strange new job of making bots love your brand.

We also talked about the publishing industry being in a decline.

Cloudflare just segmented AI traffic into three types: Search, Agents, and Training, and they’re letting their customers turn access on or off for each type. That’s better than a single on/off switch for bots, but for a high-end website that isn’t enough control.

The real control businesses need is for each service within those categories. They need to decide which crawler gets which content, for what purpose, and under what terms.

This isn’t hypothetical. One of WordPress VIP’s enterprise customers might want to allow every bot to access their site except Perplexity, because they’re negotiating a deal with them. Another maybe has a deal with Perplexity and loves them, but needs to block OpenAI. And many customers just want all bots redirected to TollBit to collect micropayments for accessing their content.

Giving three on/off switches isn’t enough. Enterprise customers need fine-grained controls, down to the individual service.

I did 3 hours of back-to-back Zoom calls from my local Starbucks this morning. There were a few moments where I felt like I was making people suffer through some background noise to indulge me and my caffeine addiction, but it could have been crazier, right?

AI isn’t replacing websites. But it IS changing what they’re used for.

For years, websites have been the destination.

Today, they’re your system of record that powers AI interactions everywhere else.

I got to join Lauren Goerz on The Dialogue Architects Podcast to explore all the ways that AI is reshaping enterprise content management, digital experiences and the future of work.

We covered enterprise websites as the source of truth in an AI-first world, how answer engines are changing content discovery and totally disrupting traditional customer buying journeys, and why governance and accessibility matter even more as adoption grows. We also talked about jobs to be done (JTBD) as a better way to divide work between people and agents, and what conversational interfaces could mean for enterprise software.

Thanks Lauren for a fun, wide-ranging conversation. You do great research and run a fantastic show.

We did a lot on this one!

Watch us here:

Our big “Future of the Web” research report says that people hate sites that are robotic. They hate digital experiences, things that feel synthetic.

Does it really need to be like this?

The first sites I built in the ‘90s were all by hand. There were no CMSes. Then we hooked up databases to websites. In 2000, browsers added a way to let people make content bold and add links and images. From there, filling websites became a big machine, an assembly line. That’s who I work with. Large sites with large teams making thousands of new stories every day for millions of visitors.

You NEED a machine for that.

Heck, if you want to compete, you NEED AI for that.

But does it have to feel like robots made it?

Two-thirds of people can’t name a single brand that’s doing AI well in their own messaging. They can’t name one.

So the bad news is: everything is terrible.

I guess the good news is: maybe YOU can be the one who isn’t terrible?

And if you do manage to cut through all of the AI slop and reach people with a story that’s organic and human, one that feels like a person made it, maybe your audience will stick around and your business will win.

Your developers are completely AI-pilled. They live in Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf. But your security model doesn’t.

That’s why Secure MCP matters for WordPress VIP. Your agents run as a signed-in VIP Dashboard user. They can only do what you allow them to do. Trying to perform sensitive operations or accessing high-risk resources only happens if you pass our Step-up Authentication. Every command you run gets recorded in our immutable MCP Call Log. Secure MCP gives teams more than 50 platform tools through one governed endpoint: apps, environments, domains, logs, metrics, users, and WordPress content workflows too.

And there’s a kill switch that pauses all access in under 60 seconds.

That kill switch is really important, because AI governance is meaningless if it can be ignored.

Are you old enough* to remember Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

Originally, you had two choices with Google search. You could get a page with 10 links or if you were feeling lucky, you would just be taken to the top result. But there is no single top search result for a query anymore. Google serves you different results depending on where you are, who you are, what browser you’re using, what time of day it is.

There is no one answer.

AI answers are following that same pattern. According to a massive research study WordPress VIP just did about AI usage, most people still click through to the source after an AI answer, because the trust isn’t there yet.

But those clicks are just a phase.

The trust gap is closing faster than anything before it. It took Google more than twenty years to earn “I’m Feeling Lucky,” to get to the point where we just trust it to answer our questions for us and no one clicks any links. Publishers call this Google Zero, where Google no longer sends them any traffic.

When your search and AI traffic goes to zero, will your business survive? Do you have a direct connection to your audience? To your customers?

* The button still exists if you visit google.com on a laptop, but you’ll never see it when you search on a mobile browser or when you search from a URL bar. In fact, the button now cycles between feeling “lucky” and “hungry” and “playful” and “adventurous.” It’s a relic.