AI agents, WordPress, and what's actually changing for site owners in 2026

848 billion visits. That's how many times people went to Google in December 2025. ChatGPT? 5.5 billion. A 15x gap, and that's before you count Google Gemini.

So no, traditional search isn't dead. But something is shifting underneath it, and if you run a WordPress site, you need to pay attention.

AI agents are already browsing the web on behalf of real people. They're comparing products, filling in forms, reading your knowledge base, and making recommendations. Not in some far off future. Right now. And your site either works for them or it doesn't.

We covered all of this (and a lot more) in our recent Women of WP livestream with Daphne Monro and Cory Miller. If you'd rather watch the full session, here it is. Otherwise, keep scrolling for the key takeaways and practical steps you can act on straight away.

AI agents are already browsing the web on behalf of real people. They're comparing products, filling in forms, reading your knowledge base, and making recommendations. Not in some far off future. Right now. And your site either works for them or it doesn't.

What are AI agents and why should you care?

Think of them as personal assistants that use the internet the same way you do, just faster and with zero tolerance for slow pages or missing information.

Platforms like N8N have exploded because they let people build custom agent workflows without writing code. When we surveyed American online users about what they want most from AI agents, the number one answer was straightforward: a personal assistant.

"The number one thing that people want from the agent web is someone, an agent, an AI bot, to be their personal assistant. So that's really important when we look at what kind of content we're creating on our websites." - Daphne Monro

These agents communicate through protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Google's A2A (agent to agent). They find each other, negotiate roles, access information, and get things done. The agentic web isn't a buzzword. It's the infrastructure being built right now, and we expect it to grow significantly through 2026 and well beyond.

The marketing funnel is getting squeezed

The classic funnel still exists. Awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, purchase. But agents are compressing the middle of it.

Here's why that matters. If someone's been using ChatGPT regularly, their agent already knows their preferences. It knows whether they care more about price or support. Whether uptime matters more than scalability. So all that comparing and evaluating that a human would normally do across multiple tabs? The agent handles it in seconds.

"When these users take out that middle bit of consideration and evaluation, we need to have the right content on our site for these agents to pull and say, hey, this is the right solution for this persona." - Daphne Monro

What this means practically: your site needs content tailored to specific personas, not just one generic landing page. At hosting.com, we think about three distinct groups:

1. Complete beginners building their first website

2. Agency owners managing multiple client sites

3. Enterprise clients who already know exactly what they need

Each group has different pain points, different questions, and different language. If your content only speaks to one of them, agents serving the other two will skip right past you.

Your site needs to do things, not just say things

This might be the single most important shift for WordPress site owners to grasp. Agents don't just read your content. They need to complete actions on your site.

What agents need from your WordPress site:

• Forms that can be filled in programmatically

• Downloadable PDFs and resources

• Booking systems and checkout flows

• Up to date documentation and knowledge bases

• Clean structured data and schema markup

• Partners and integrations that are built for agentic conformance (tools like Zapier, for instance)

"Update your documentation, your knowledge bases and support content because LLMs and agents will be referencing this to help them complete tasks. If you don't have that information online, they won't be able to do the job." - Daphne Monro

Accessibility plays a huge role here. Good accessibility has always meant a good bot experience. Check your ARIA tags, make sure your alt text is solid, and keep your structured data accurate. You've been doing this for humans and screen readers for years. Now you're doing the same thing for AI agents.

Markdown over HTML

One thing we're doing at hosting.com that's worth knowing about: we use markdown for our content instead of traditional HTML. The reason is simple. Markdown takes far fewer tokens for bots to process. Less code to parse means agents can digest your content faster and at lower cost.

Not every WordPress site will be able to switch, but it's worth considering for your content pages especially.

What about llms.txt?

There's been a lot of noise online about llms.txt replacing robots.txt. It won't. Your robots.txt allow and disallow rules aren't going anywhere.

llms.txt is a proposed protocol, written in markdown, that gives LLMs a structured summary of your site. It's worth experimenting with, but proceed with open eyes.

"Google put an llms.txt on their site and then took it down the following week. So we're in the trial and error phase. I personally don't think there's any harm in giving it a go and seeing if your citations increase." - Daphne Monro

Google is still the foundation (and the data proves it)

If you've been hearing that SEO is dead and Google is finished, the numbers paint a very different picture.

That's a 15x lead. Not including Gemini.

"Anybody that's saying traditional SEO is dead or that Google is dead, I have to say be quiet. We can see clearly that users are still going to Google." - Daphne Monro

People are using LLMs, absolutely. But for different things. Research, conversation, building up context. The transactional stuff? Still largely happening on Google. The UK had the lowest AI Overview adoption rate as of November 2025, though the US is climbing fast.

The takeaway isn't to choose between traditional SEO and AI visibility. You need both. And the good news is that most of what makes you rank on Google also makes you visible to LLMs.

Track sentiment, not just clicks

One shift worth making right now: start tracking how LLMs talk about your brand.

Go to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Type in your brand name. Ask the LLM what it thinks about your business, what customers say about you, how you compare to competitors. The answers will tell you where your authority is strong and where you've got gaps.

"Having those conversations with LLMs and seeing how you are being showcased with different prompts... all of that data is super important and helps you create the right content moving forward." - Daphne Monro

Clicks are becoming less reliable as a metric, partly because of AI Overviews and zero click results. Sentiment gives you a new way to measure how your brand is perceived across the web.

Three SEO myths to stop believing

There's a lot of noise in the SEO space right now. Here are three myths worth putting to bed.

Myth 1: Page sections rank independently in AI Overviews

Some people are claiming that if you chunk your content into distinct sections on a single URL, each section will rank on its own. The testing doesn't support this. Clean heading hierarchy is still good practice (one H1, H2s for sections, H3s and H4s underneath), but don't over engineer your page structure chasing this theory.

Myth 2: AI content gets penalised

Google had documentation saying this a few years ago. They removed it. Quality content is quality content, however it was produced. Use AI for research, structure, editing. Just don't expect a one sentence prompt to give you something worth publishing.

"Garbage in, garbage out. But high quality content in, high quality content out." - Daphne Monro

Myth 3: Evergreen content is a safe bet

This one stings. If a piece of content answers a simple, unchanging question, AI Overviews will cover it. Zero clicks. No traffic for you. Every piece of content now needs an evolution plan:

• Set calendar reminders to revisit your top performing posts

• Add fresh updates, even a single paragraph for the new year helps

• Refresh your publish date

• Update FAQs on your landing pages

• Swap in new data points and examples

"Content freshness is key to ranking, especially on AI Overviews or LLMs. They're swapping out content all the time for whatever is fresh and relevant."

Daphne Monro

Build one piece of content, turn it into ten

Here's a workflow that saves serious time. Start with one long form piece of content, a webinar, a YouTube video, a detailed interview, and repurpose it across every channel you've got.

The stat that backs it up: 90% of internet users watch video every single day.

From one piece of long form video, you can create:

1. A lead gen signup page (before or after the event)

2. Short form clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts

3. A standalone Q&A video from the audience questions

4. A podcast episode

5. Long form blog content that goes deeper on the technical bits

6. Downloadable one pagers or PDFs

7. Reddit responses (more on this below)

8. Social content across platforms

9. An email nurture sequence

It's a flywheel. At hosting.com, questions we don't have time to answer during a livestream become detailed blog posts. Video clips get chopped for social. And all of it feeds into the next event.

A four email promo sequence worth stealing

The head of marketing at Moz shared their webinar promo framework at a recent conference. Their signup numbers prove it works.

Worth testing for your next event, even if you dial down the fear angle (we do at hosting.com, we're more about community than scare tactics).

Why Reddit should be part of your strategy

90% of consumers say authenticity influences their buying decisions. Reddit is the largest collection of authentic user generated content on the internet. And after signing a $60 million deal with Google in 2024, it's been climbing the SERPs consistently.

But you can't just create an account and start promoting. That'll get you banned from subreddits in hours.

A three step approach that actually works:

1. Scout (spend your first week gathering insights). Join subreddits where your personas hang out. Watch what competitors are doing. Learn the tone. Don't post yet.

2. Make contextual contributions. Answer questions in your niche authentically. Share genuine experience. No product pushing.

3. Start conversations. Once you've built credibility, bring your own topics. Open ended questions, roadmap updates, ask me anythings. Value first, always.

How the technical SEO role is changing

If you're a WordPress developer, agency owner, or technical SEO, your day to day is shifting. The breakdown looks something like this:

Take writing alt text for an entire site. Manually? That's days of work. With an automated workflow connected to an AI model? Thousands of images done in seconds.

But the human stays in the loop. Always.

"AI isn't here to replace anyone. It's just here to scale you, especially if you are part of a WordPress agency. This opens the doors for unlimited opportunity."

Daphne Monro

For WordPress agencies, that's a genuine commercial opportunity. Build a workflow once, sell it to multiple clients.

Speed matters even more now

Site speed has always been important. But now it matters for a second audience: the bots.

LLMs and agents are spending real money crawling your site. They've got limited token budgets, just like traditional search crawlers have crawl budgets. If your site is slow, they'll abandon it and move to a competitor.

Good caching, server side rendering, and the right hosting infrastructure aren't optional. At hosting.com, speed is one of our four pillars for managed WordPress. It's the reason conversations like this keep coming back to performance.

Keep the conversation going

If you want to go deeper on any of these topics, whether that's PHP, JavaScript, SEO, building agentic workflows, or something else, we want to hear from you.

Connect with Daphne on LinkedIn and join our Agency Success community at MyAgencySuccess.com for regular sessions, training with Nathan Ingram, and access to experts across WordPress and digital marketing.

See you at the next one.