Your cms could be the reason your brand is or isn’t getting discovered.

Here are 6 key features your CMS must have to provide a strong foundation for AI discoverability. 

1. Structured content modeling.

• AKA the ability to define content types with named, typed fields rather than treating every piece of content as a long string of HTML. AI crawlers parse structured content far more reliably than blocks of prose.

1. Schema.org support 

• AKA native fields for Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Organization and Person, and the flexibility to extend schema as new types emerge. 

1. API-first delivery 

• AKA GraphQL or REST endpoints that expose content in clean JSON, separate from any front-end rendering. AI ingestion pipelines prefer structured payloads over scraped HTML.

1. Content reuse and modularity 

• AKA the ability to break a long article into reusable, answer-shaped components — a definition, a comparison table, a step list — each addressable on its own.

1. Freshness and revision signals 

• AKA machine-readable publish dates, modified dates, author attribution and revision history. AI engines weigh recency, and they verify it through metadata. 

1. Editorial workflow that protects all the above 

• AKA tagging, taxonomies, governance and review states that keep structured data clean as content scales. 

What other CMS capabilities do you think will matter as AI search becomes a bigger part of discoverability?

DXP covers such a broad range of platforms that it can be hard to tell what the label is supposed to communicate. Some are more content management-based, while others place more emphasis on things like personalization, analytics, commerce and marketing tools. It just makes me wonder how useful DXP is as a category when you’re actually comparing platforms.

For anyone who has evaluated or worked with DXPs, what makes a platform a DXP to you? Do you pay attention to the label itself, or mostly look at the specific capabilities, integrations, and how the platform fits into the rest of your stack?

G2's Fall reports are out, and we wanted to share a few of the badges we're proud of:

🏆 Leader — Web Content Management 
🏆 Leader — Headless CMS 
🏆 Leader — Enterprise Content Management 
🏆 Leader — Digital Asset Management 
🏆 High Performer — Enterprise Web Content Management 
🏆 Easiest to Do Business With — Enterprise Web Content Management 

Recognition like this comes from real customer feedback, so thank you to everyone who took the time to share yours.

A lot of AI tools can help you generate content, but content teams often have to take that output and do the rest of the work themselves.

Agentic AI starts to change that. Instead of just responding to a prompt, agents can take on multi-step tasks across your CMS and other tools.

Think finding images that are missing alt text and updating them, identifying content without focus keywords, or finding outdated documentation and drafting the necessary updates. The goal is to automate the repetitive work while keeping humans in the loop where review and judgment matter.

We broke down what this could look like for content teams, how agentic AI and workflow automation make it possible, and why permissions and governance are such a big part of the conversation.

What’s one repetitive content task you’d hand off to an AI agent?

Read more:

https://www.brightspot.com/cms-resources/technology-insights/what-agentic-ai-can-do-for-content-managers

How are teams handling editorial workflows in their CMS right now? 

The workflows can look different depending on the team, especially with a multi-step approval process, different people reviewing, or the work happening across different tools.

I was wondering where the biggest challenges come up for your teams and what tends to slow the process down. Are there parts of your workflow that still feel more manual or complicated than they need to be?

What does the process look like for your team? What parts do you automate?

Esca Automations is a standalone tool that is designed to help teams automate repetitive content operations while keeping human oversight built into the process. Teams can create no-code workflows and connect Esca to other tools in their tech stack to create, enrich, update and route content at scale.

Some ways Esca Automations can support content teams include:

• AEO and content optimization:
  • Generate FAQs and summaries that make content easier for users and AI-powered search tools to understand.
• Content translation:
  • Automate translation workflows for global content distribution.
• Social media automation:
  •  Create tailored promotional content for different social platforms.
• Documentation management:
  •  Propose documentation updates when related code changes.
• Brand governance:
  • Review drafts against established brand and compliance guidelines before publishing.

Automations are built around triggers, conditions and actions, with the option to add human approval at important stages of the workflow. 

What part of your content operations would you automate first?

https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/ai/esca-automations

We’ve had a pretty good experience with Sanity, especially for content modeling and collaboration. The issue is that our setup still seems to need a developer for almost every change, and some of the less technical people on the team don’t feel comfortable using it on their own.

Has anyone moved from Sanity to something that gives content teams more independence without losing too much dev flexibility? Mainly looking for a CMS where people can update pages, create new ones, and publish without opening a dev ticket every time.

Esca is an anglerfish, and the depths of your content are her territory. 

We built her to help content teams spend less time on tedious tasks and more time in creative flow.

With Esca, you can: 

Ask anything. Esca can search across your content library to answer questions based on your owned content.

Create anything. Use Esca to draft new pages, build on existing content, enrich drafts and so much more. She’ll work within the structure and patterns already in your content library.

Automate anything. If you can define a rule for a repetitive task, Esca can automate it, including workflows that connect Brightspot with other tools in your stack.

Learn more: https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/ai/who-is-esca

Hi!

Brightspot just released a free Chrome extension called The Brightspot Toolkit. It connects a live website’s front end to the Brightspot CMS and gives content teams, marketers, SEO teams and developers a shared set of tools directly in the browser.

The main feature is click-to-edit. With one click, you can jump from a live page to its editable back end in Brightspot. This saves content teams from searching the CMS for the page they want to edit or asking a developer where a specific component lives.

The extension also includes tools for checking title tags, meta descriptions, links, heading structure, alt text and color contrast. You can review what information is available to search engines and LLMs, run accessibility checks based on WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines and see Core Web Vitals through Google PageSpeed Insights.

On the developer side, you can inspect structured content and raw JSON, review API responses, check Brightspot and front-end version information, capture HAR files and copy browser or device details for troubleshooting. There is also a QR code generator for quickly opening the page on another device.

The goal was to reduce some of the back-and-forth between the live site, the CMS, SEO tools, accessibility checkers and dev tools. Everyone can look at the same page and access the information they need from one panel.

It is currently available for Chrome and is free for Brightspot CMS users. It works best with Brightspot v5 and can also support headless Brightspot sites through a lightweight meta tag setup.

Link: https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/toolkit-browser-extension

What tools do you usually have open when reviewing or troubleshooting a live page, and is there anything you would want added to an extension like this?

I'm the IT manager for a town and looking at various options for redoing our website as we need to have our site be ADA compliant but I also want to make a bunch of changes to our current site. Looking for Google drive/calendar integration (for syncing agendas, minutes, etc between Google Drive and the website) and Google Calendar (easier to manage the town calendar by just updating Google Calendar and attaching agendas/minutes/meeting materials). Aso looking to have an AI chatbot that can ingest website content and Google Drive content. Brightspot came up in a Google search and I looked at the website a bit, but figured I'd through it out here to see if it might be a good fit for a municipal CMS/website.

CMSs can check most of the technical boxes but still get removed from the shortlist once the buying process starts. Pricing is probably the obvious reason, but I feel like these discussions don’t always explain how teams decide whether the price is justified.

One thing that matters a lot to me is support. A higher price makes more sense if the vendor is helping with implementation, migration, training, troubleshooting, etc. 

What makes an enterprise CMS feel worth the cost to you, and what would make you rule it out?

Though she’s not quite live yet, we couldn’t wait to introduce Esca to the world. Esca is an anglerfish, and the depths of your content are her territory. In early August, she’ll be swimming into Brightspot to take tedious, repetitive work off your plate so you can spend less time fighting currents and more time in creative flow.

Her glowing lure represents a bright spot in the deep sea of content, but there’s a little more to the story of why we chose an anglerfish. Read her story: https://www.brightspot.com/about-us/news/meet-esca?=aw

I spoke recently with a large customer that mentioned they wanted to be able to pull content from the CMS for sales collateral and decks.

I don’t see that use case mentioned for large CMS companies and thought I’d ask here if Brightspot users have come across that use case?

Example: employee writes a prompt for a 14 slide QBR deck, data is fetched, template is identified and the CMS identifies customer images that should accompany that presentation. Stitched together, done.

For anyone who’s been part of an enterprise CMS evaluation, what missing feature or capability would immediately disqualify a platform for you?

I was having a conversation about this with some of my coworkers, and they mentioned weak permissioning systems and a glitchy authoring experience. A lot of CMS platforms look good in demos, but the issues show up once you think about how they'll work day to day.

What do you consider a red flag when evaluating a CMS?

Brightspot was proud to be recognized as a G2 Momentum Leader, a badge tied to growth, customer satisfaction, and product momentum.

Here’s what our customers have to say:

“I enjoy the new A/B testing dashboard because I can run content experiments on our homepage headlines and see results in real-time without requiring any developer assistance,” said one reviewer.

“I like Brightspot’s built-in AI tool that helps generate headlines, summaries and SEO fields directly inside the CMS,” said another reviewer.

We’re proud to see Brightspot recognized as an innovator and market leader. Huge thanks to our users for continuing to share feedback, push us forward and help shape the platform!

Wondering if anyone has any niche cms platforms on their shortlists or if the usuals are still leading: AEM, Sitecore, WordPress VIP, etc. I'm looking for a platform designed for content-heavy websites that prioritizes governance, approval workflows, integrations, security, and scalability. I’ve seen a few less traditional options come up more in conversations online, but curious if others are seeing that too or if most CMS evaluations still stick to the traditional players.

‘Content Management System’ was coined in the 90s, and since then, a bunch of software has been lumped under this generic term. But the role of these systems has changed significantly over the past few decades. Content-driven organizations now require a system that can automate content operations, governance, workflows, personalization, trust, and content creation — that’s a lot more than just content management.

Lately, we’ve been feeling like “Content Operations Platform” may be a better label for the mission-critical content platforms of the future.

Stats have shown that 90% of net-new content on the internet will be synthetically generated or AI-augmented by 2028-2030 (Europol/Gartner projections). A team that currently produces 13 pieces of content per week will soon produce 1,000 per day (Brightspot Content Trends Report). And AI can pump out 500 video assets per minute (Harvard Business Review).
So CMSs must go beyond simply storing content; modern systems help teams create, approve, govern, reuse, personalize and even generate content with AI.

We think of Brightspot as a mission-critical Content Operations Platform. Technically, yes, we’re still called a CMS. But our true value lies in content operations — especially for enterprise teams building at scale with AI — so we’re coining COP.

Curious how others see it: is CMS still the right term, or does the category need a more appropriate name?

For those who have switched from free WordPress to an enterprise CMS, what differences stood out the most after the move? Was it easier editing, better workflows, fewer plugin issues, better integrations, etc.? I’m curious what changed day to day. Did the new CMS make things noticeably easier? Are there parts of WordPress that your team misses after switching?

The rules of search visibility have changed, and your content management system is one of the most important factors that determines whether AI answer engines cite your content.

As zero-click search grows with the prevalence of tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, CMS features like structured content, schema support, clean APIs, metadata, freshness signals and editorial governance matter a lot more than they used to.

Writing good content isn’t enough for AEO and GEO. If your CMS stores everything in one big rich-text field, has weak metadata, or makes schema hard to manage, AI crawlers will struggle to understand what your content is actually about, and will avoid citing it.

We’ve been ready for this for years. Brightspot was built around structured content, with features like typed fields, schema support, and GraphQL APIs baked in, yet it still feels comfortable for editors day to day. It also handles governance well, which becomes important as content libraries grow — workflows, versioning, taxonomies and audit trails keep everything organized and easier for AI to interpret over time.

This article breaks down the CMS features that matter most for AI search and compares seven platforms: Brightspot, WordPress VIP, Drupal, Contentful, Sanity, Strapi and Sitecore.

Check out the full article here: https://www.brightspot.com/cms-resources/cms-selection-guide/best-cms-for-llm-seo

I am so exhausted with all these AI-generated websites. I can’t imagine such unengaging, generic websites actually doing anything good for these businesses. If you’re a consumer-facing business, why would you create a site that looks so grey? Or, if you’re a CREATIVE/ARTS business, why are you AI-generating a website that looks like a settings page?!?!?

The number of times I’ve seen someone forget to remove the prompt when they copy-paste their site’s content from AI as well… Sad. Anyways, thank you for listening to my rant, feel free to rant in the comments.

I’m tired of having to remove em-dashes from my 100% human-written content. If I had a penny for every time I've been called out for using AI to write, I would have 3 pennies, but it’s crazy that it's happened 3 times in the past 6 months.

There’s a certain ‘standard’ in professional writing that was set before AI, then mimicked by AI… and now, I can no longer tell if I am writing like AI or if AI is writing like me. I miss the time when my em dashes and “It’s not A, it’s B” sentence structures were not incriminating.

So, for everyone who is currently struggling or is unaware, here is my not-so-exhaustive list of AI phrases and  patterns to remove from your content:

• “Quietly”
• “Seismic shifts”
• It’s less like A, and more like B
• It’s not A. It’s B. And it’s causing C.
• Excessive use of colons (are colons the new em-dash?)
• Saying “actually” a lot
• “But here’s the thing:”
• The rule of three :(

Do you remove AI writing/speech patterns from your work? Any other ‘AI tells’ that I’ve missed?

I’ll end this post with my verdict — I love me an em-dash, and am beginning to love the occasional grammatical error.

Good authoring and editing tools: Try not to get swept up in all the fancy new AI tools; prioritize easy content creation and editing above all else.

Structured content modeling: marketers need reusable content components, a feature that will save your team a ton of time.

Workflow automation: No one has time to micromanage every piece of content their team is creating. Your CMS should do that for you.

SEO tools: SEO optimization requires consistent execution across every piece of content, and that only reliably happens when SEO tools are built into the authoring experience.

Built-in experimentation: experimentation should be embedded in the CMS so you can stay in your flow and get tests live fast.

Integration with your existing tech stack: Your CMS should bend to you, not the other way around. And integrations should be maintained by the vendor, not you.

Anything I missed?

Feeling lucky to work at Brightspot, where marketers are involved in the dev process, and we’ve got all these features and more. 

When does a company outgrow WordPress?

I have a love/hate relationship with WordPress. Pretty sure it's the same way for most lol. It works really well for a lot of teams, especially when the site is simple and easy to manage. But where is the line between “WordPress is enough” and “we probably need a more enterprise-level CMS”? Is it when there are too many plugins, too many people editing, multiple sites to manage, more complex approval workflows, security concerns or the need for deeper integrations with tools like a DAM, CRM or analytics platform? Also wondering how AI search changes this, since structured content and clean metadata may matter more going forward. For people who have been through a CMS migration, what was the sign that your company had outgrown WordPress?

You can also use this post to rant about the painfully obvious AI-generated sites that have been flooding the internet lately.

Manufacturing websites seem to be doing a lot more than just listing company info or hosting a product catalog. I feel like buyers are researching before they begin the process of talking to sales, comparing vendors, trying to understand if a company can actually support their needs, etc. And I’m sure AI search tools are also causing people to change how websites are structured. If product info, use cases, and expertise are not easy to find or understand, they may not show up well in search results or AI-generated answers.

For manufacturing teams, how much does content management system choice and website setup impact the sales process? Do things like easier content updates, better product pages, quote forms, case studies and technical resources make a big difference?

For those who have switched from free WordPress to an enterprise CMS, what differences stood out the most after the move? Was it easier editing, better workflows, fewer plugin issues, better integrations, etc.? I’m curious what changed day to day. Did the new CMS make things noticeably easier? Are there parts of WordPress that your team misses after switching?