Does your CMS Impact Your Brand’s Visibility in AI Search?

Justin Cook is President of Internet Marketing & Development at 9thCO and a CMS Critic contributor. 

Since the rise in popularity of ChatGPT and other AI search tools, marketers have watched in horror as KPIs drown in red. Organic traffic continues to decline as users begin to “trust” AI search, oftentimes not even leaving the chat experience to explore a cited brand’s website. 

This behavior is likely to compound as people increasingly offload tedious research, and therefore marketing teams need to adapt and understand what’s needed in order to “show up” in chat, establishing visibility (a.k.a. “share of voice”). This goes far beyond keyword research and throwing schema markup on your site.

A critical piece of understanding is the underlying mental model. When using AI chat to ask questions, if the LLM (predominantly static) doesn’t have the data, then a retrieval layer brings in fresher data via relevant “chunked” search queries in order to synthesize an accurate response. 

Therefore, the goal is not to “optimize for LLMs,” but rather to understand the mechanics of how LLMs leverage retrieval mechanisms and provide the optimal website markup, performance, accessibility, and data structures to qualify for retrieval. 

And like it or not, the CMS that powers your website behind the scenes can have a direct impact, depending on rendering, markup, and technical SEO capabilities.

A Proposed Paradigm of Retrievability: EACA

EACA stands for Eligibility, Authority, Compressibility, and Association. These four areas generally encompass factors that influence discoverability. We won’t touch on Authority in this article, as that’s less about technical infrastructure and more about how you're building your brand. 

1. Eligibility

When you are engaged in a chat experience, some of the perceived “magic” is that you’re in a natural flow of conversation. Therefore, responses are critically time-bound. If you ask a question and have to wait 15 seconds for the response, you would not continue the conversation. 

So essentially, Eligibility is the determination of whether a page can be crawled, rendered, and indexed. There are standard CMS considerations such as robots.txt configuration, server-side generation/rendering, caching, and revalidation. 

What this means practically is that you could be ranking #1 in SERPs for many keywords, yet less likely to be indexed, retrieved, or cited by retrieval mechanisms if your CMS employs lazy-loading, infinite scrolling, JavaScript-based rendering, or weak template-to-content ratios.

Properly implemented headless CMS solutions can improve Eligibility by decoupling the frontend, where it is stored statically and served from a global edge network.

2. Compressibility

Compressibility is about assessing the smallest unit of data and content that something can be reduced to while still remaining accurate. This ensures that content is easy to summarize and embed, without losing precision.

Interestingly, one of the most straightforward means to ensure Compressibility is to ensure the highest possible standard of web accessibility on your site. How so? Accessible semantic markup creates a clear content hierarchy for AI retrieval mechanisms, making content easier to chunk and summarize and thereby less ambiguous during compression.

Again, your choice of CMS has a material impact on your ability to achieve full web accessibility. The following are common limitations:

• Theming “engine” architecture
• CMS-specific markup
• Editor tooling constraints
• Plugin ecosystem and rendering methodologies 
• Page builder behaviors and data models (or lack thereof)

Another major factor for Compressibility (particularly for retailers) is surfacing data points as high-signal, atomic facts. So auditing your data governance from the source to how it’s published through your CMS and marked up on the frontend can have a major impact.

Ideally, any selected CMS should provide complete control over the front-end implementation and remove any possible theming constraints.

3. Association

It’s important that an LLM can properly interpret the appropriate conversations within which your brand and content are relevant. The notion of Association means clearly establishing the concepts, entities, and problems your brand/page/content belongs “with.” 

Association is established via entity co-occurrence, explicit language, and tight topical clusters, which are not CMS-dependent. However, something that helps further by reducing ambiguity and introducing machine-readable relationships is schema markup. Ensure that your CMS allows you to maximize the use of appropriate schema markup in articles, case studies, etc. But it’s also critical to ensure that the schema markup that is surfaced on the frontend is valid. 

Conclusion

AI search-referred users can be highly qualified and engaged, and more likely to convert. It’s true that digital transformation projects are serious undertakings, but it’s worth the effort to ensure that your CMS can support the technical fundamentals and data structures that feed retrieval mechanisms – and surface your content!

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