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Agentic AI Article

Bland Brands Beware: Optimizely’s New Identity Brings Human Creativity to its Agentic AI and AEO Ambitions

matt-garrepy

Diving Deep with Palmata: Contentful Uplevels AEO to Help Brands Understand and Influence AI Discoverability

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/tom-cranstoun">Tom Cranstoun,</a> “The MX Guy,” is the principal consultant at Digital Domain Technologies Limited, author of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mx.allabout.network/books/">MX: The Handbook</a>, and a CMS Critic contributor. <hr /> Content operations and content design are doing the right things. They're providing governance frameworks, taxonomy, structured authoring, and lifecycle management. Over time, the disciplines have matured.Up until now, content ops has focused on human readers. Now, in an era where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/bots-now-outnumber-humans-on-the-internet-heres-what-that-actually-means/">bot traffic is outnumbering humans,</a> the dynamic has shifted. Machines have become the predominant audience, and they have different requirements. The gap is narrower than it looks – and more specific. That gap is where most organizations are going to get stuck. Cogs that don’t mesh don’t move anything. They just grind. But there's hope, and it starts by understanding the crucial role of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mx.allabout.network/">MX: Machine Experience.</a><h3 id="what-machines-need-that-humans-don’t">What Machines Need That Humans Don’t</h3>A human reading a page infers context. They notice tone, recognize brand, and understand that a press release from 2019 probably doesn’t reflect current pricing. They bring judgment.Machines don’t. And they’re not one thing.An on-device model with a small context window reads raw HTML and sees nothing beyond what’s in the initial server response. A foundation-model agent with browsing tools sees the rendered DOM. A scraper never runs a model at all. A coding agent fetches once over HTTP and moves on. Each reads a different projection of the page, and none of them sees the visual rendering. The publisher can’t know which kind arrives, so designing for a specific agent is designing for a guess.Despite these differences, every machine type does one of two things: It finds a declaration, or it guesses. What is this document? Who made it? What’s it for? What can be done with it? What’s still accurate?Good content ops structures pages so humans can navigate them. That’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient. The metadata is in a database that the agent can’t reach. The relationships are implicit. The provenance isn’t embedded. The agent (whichever kind it is) fills the gaps with confidence it hasn’t earned.That’s not a failure of content design. It’s an extension that hasn’t been built yet.Now, take it one step further. A machine doesn’t always read your content inside your environment. For example, a PDF getting ingested by another organization’s LLM, or a page being scraped and stored in a vector database. A document travels through three systems before an agent even acts on it. At that point, the CMS is gone. The database is gone. The metadata that lived in the platform’s tables is gone. What’s left is the file. If the file carries nothing (no provenance, no authorship, no permissions, no declared scope), the agent has nothing to work with except the words. It guesses the rest.This is the old problem, made new and urgent. Documents have always lost context when they leave their environment. MX is built specifically for that moment.<h3 id="governance-built-into-the-document">Governance Built Into the Document</h3>A CMS isn’t just software. It’s a controller of a publishing point. It has an implicit contract with the data owner to make content visible to humans in a way that benefits the owner. That obligation now implicitly includes machines, whether anyone asked for it or not. When it fails, the data owner blames the vendor. The vendor blames the agency. Nobody owns the failure because nobody wrote machines into the contract.A plugin doesn’t close this gap. Neither does a model upgrade or an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">MCP (Model Context Protocol)</a> endpoint. Those wrap the content. They don’t change it. What makes the difference is governance built into the document itself. Not bolted on, not held in a separate system. That’s what a COG is: Community Owned Governance. It's a portable, self-describing document standard that carries its own context wherever it travels. It includes vital details like what it is, who made it, what it’s for, and what an agent is and isn’t permitted to do with it.Take a cog out of a machine, and it stops. Take governance out of a document, and the machine that's reading it stops working, too. It doesn’t issue an error. It hallucinates. And that's even worse. The work that content ops and content design have already done – the taxonomy, the schema, the approval chains – is exactly the right foundation. A COG is how that work travels with the content, instead of staying behind in a CMS database that the agent can never query.<h3 id="ownership-only-works-with-structure">Ownership Only Works With Structure</h3>The organizations getting real value from AI aren’t pouring content into shared infrastructure and hoping for the best. They’re running models on their own data and building agents against their own knowledge base.That only works if the data has structure – and as stated, that structure can travel. Ownership without portable structure is a hard drive full of files nobody can act on safely. A document with provenance (where the relationships are explicit and the records are verifiable) is something you can point a machine at and trust the result.<h3 id="the-asset-that-compounds">The Asset That Compounds</h3>Within a few years, most online content will be machine-generated. Volume is already cheap. So is velocity.What becomes scarce is authorship. Content that a human wrote, edited, argued over, and signed off on. Content that has a history. That doesn’t depreciate when generation gets cheaper. In fact, it appreciates – because it’s the thing machines can’t produce and audiences can distinguish.The right home for that content is a system where governance is built into every document: structured, provenance-intact, and verifiable. Pointing a model at well-governed content produces something qualitatively different from pointing it at an undifferentiated pile.Content ops and content design got us here. COGs take it the rest of the way. The organizations that understand this aren’t waiting for the next release note. They’ve already got the cogs turning.<h3 id="is-your-pdf-mx-compatible?">Is your PDF MX Compatible?</h3>See what the gaps are in practice! <ol><li>Visit <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mx.allabout.network/tools/pdf-inspector.html">https://mx.allabout.network/tools/pdf-inspector.html</a> </li><li>Drop in a PDF sample where instructed. Your browser reads it locally, and the PDF never leaves your machine. </li><li>The inspector reports what the file carries, what it lacks, and what a regulator or AI agent would find if they tried to verify it.</li></ol> <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3>  <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26"><img style="width:41.96%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/05/cms-connect-logo-26.jpg" /></a><h4 id="cms-connect-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26">CMS Connect 26</a></h4>August 5-6, 2026 – Montreal, CanadaThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Connect brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Montreal, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26">so book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:35.73%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/05/image-1778200565145.png" /><h4 id="contentstack-contentcon-2026">Contentstack <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/contentcon">ContentCon 2026</a></h4>September 30 - October 1, Amsterdam  /  October 27-28, 2026 – ChicagoContentstack’s annual customer conference is the premier event for executives, marketing leaders, and developers to redefine their digital experience strategy. This is your opportunity to step out of the "status quo" and into "elite" status, learning exactly how the world’s most successful brands are using the technology you already own to do the impossible. Enjoy a full day of interactive workshops, certifications, and inspirational on-stage sessions designed to help you become an expert on cutting-edge digital strategies and how to turn Contentstack's CMS and adaptive personalization tools into your greatest competitive advantage.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> </a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/contentcon">Book your seats today.</a>

Without Cogs, No Machine Moves

tom-cranstoun

‘Crunch Time’ for AI Visibility: Sitecore’s Acquisition of Scrunch Gives Brands an Edge Beyond AEO

Where Native DXP AI Fits Within an Agentic Enterprise Strategy

dan-drapeau

No More Kicking the CMS Tires: As Salesforce Acquires Contentful, Can it Keep the Wheels on the AI Road?

Meet the Agents: Kentico Fields an ‘AI Dream Team’ to Win the New Game of Marketing

Is ‘specialization’ the future of CMS? These 3 vendors are embracing it – and finding success

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The Razor’s Edge of AEO: How Razorfish is Sharpening the Future of AI Search

Controlling the Agentic Climb: Contentstack is Elevating Adaptive Experiences with its AXP Vision

10x Marks the Spot: Treasure Data’s Shift to ‘Treasure AI’ Maps New Value in the Agentic Era

<hr /> When I spun a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-tale-of-two-phils-exploring-umbracos-open/id1801794414?i=1000749874476">“Tale of Two Phils”</a> on an episode of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cms-critic-the-critics-corner-podcast/id1801794414">The Critic’s Corner Podcast</a> earlier this year, I wasn’t prepared for how complementary my two guests would sound. If you listen to the conversation, there are multiple such intersections between <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/umbraco">Umbraco</a> CTO <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipbech/">Filip Bech-Larsen</a> and Staff Engineer (and resident AI guru) <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-whittaker-82481716/">Phil Whitaker</a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipbech/">.</a> In many ways, the two complete each other, handing off thoughts like an MCP server connecting the dots. It elevated the knowledge on multiple levels.This makes the collaboration a solid one for Umbraco, an open source CMS that continues to diligently push forward on its agentic AI ambitions. The company’s steady pace of innovation just took another leap forward with the launch of new Backoffice Extension Skills, which are based on Anthropic’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://resources.anthropic.com/hubfs/The-Complete-Guide-to-Building-Skill-for-Claude.pdf">Agent Skills</a>. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:32.52%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/04/phil-whittaker-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>Umbraco Staff Engineer (AI) Phil Whitaker “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how digital projects are delivered,” Whitaker said, driving home the key advantages of these new additions to Umbraco. “AI is becoming the starting point for new projects and is where developers explore ideas. Backoffice Extension Skills ensure that when your team uses an AI assistant, the correct Umbraco knowledge is available.”<img /><figure class="image image_resized" style="width:80.99%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/04/umbraco-ai-platform-winter-2026.png" alt="" /></figure>Source: Umbraco Winter Keynote 2026 Umbraco’s aggressive AI product horizon was teased during its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK-eGhzZYpw">Winter Keynote in February,</a> and several digital agency partners are experimenting with creating AI-based workflows. This includes some strong use cases, such as <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://digitalwonderlab.com/umbraco-agency/umbraco-lab-notes/alt-text-shouldnt-be-this-hard-so-we-fixed-it/">Digital Wonderlab’s automated Alt Text generator</a> for improving website accessibility.<h3 id="what-are-agent-skills?-">What are Agent Skills? </h3>In a nutshell, Anthopic’s Agent Skills are like “onboarding guides” that enable AI to execute specific, complex workflows – like data analysis or file creation – without overloading its context window. Agent Skills provide modular, reusable, and organized packages that contain instructions and scripts that help developers and users build, share, and deploy agents that are more effective and context-aware.Anthropic launched Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025 under <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linuxfoundation.org/">The Linux Foundation.</a> Since then, they’ve been widely adopted, working across Claude and other AI platforms.<h3 id="maintaining-control-and-extensibility">Maintaining control and extensibility</h3>Umbraco’s Backoffice Extension Skills are like a roadmap for AI agents, guiding them to the most up-to-date Umbraco documentation, examples, and source code. Skills are exposed using a standardized endpoint that can be called by AI tools like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://claude.ai/">Claude</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chatgpt.com/">ChatGPT</a>, or custom <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.langchain.com/langchain">LangChain agents</a> – making it incredibly extensible.With this guidance, LLMs and agents use the most current version of the Umbraco software and the essential modern frameworks – where they can effectively customize the backoffice or complete tasks like building dashboards or property editors. All of Umbraco’s Backoffice Extension points are registered, documented, and supported, ensuring that customizations are maintained.According to Filip Bech-Larsen, Umbraco’s Backoffice Extension Skills are the first series of skills, aimed at supporting developers using AI agents for building and extending their digital projects. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:32.75%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/04/filip-bech-larsen-1777422652939.jpg" alt="" /></figure>Umbraco CTO Filip Bech-Larsen “Agent Skills mirror the way that Umbraco’s Backoffice Extension points work,” he added. “Each Backoffice Extension point links AI Skills to the latest Umbraco documentation, source code, and examples. This supports safer development and positions Umbraco as one of the first major CMS platforms to deliver a comprehensive, agent-ready architecture.”Ready to level up your skills? <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/the-agent-ready-cms-introducing-agent-skills-umbraco-backoffice-extension/">Learn more here.</a><h3 id="building-on-an-agentic-ai-foundation">Building on an agentic AI foundation</h3>The proof is in the pudding, as they say – and Umbraco’s partners are putting its growing AI capabilities to work. Several use cases are nominated for the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/awards/">Umbraco Awards</a> at the upcoming <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Codegarden 2026,</a> which is being held June 10-11 in Copenhagen. Case in point: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-adolfi/">Dennis Adolfi</a>, head of technology at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/knowit-experience/">Knowit Experience,</a> a leading digital agency based in the Nordics, recently shared an innovative agentic solution for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/bewigroup/">BEWI Group.</a> In the use case, agents assist or fully manage complete workflows in the dev cycle, from design to code to deployment – even through content creation. The solution relies on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://umbraco.ai/">Umbraco.AI</a> and Umbraco’s MCP to deliver transformative results, the kind that have earned Knowit a nomination for Umbraco’s Best Innovation with AI Award. “[Umbraco] really is a CMS built for AI,” Adolfi said. Another contender for this category comes from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.perplex.nl/en/">Perplex Digital</a>, which developed an AI-powered solution for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/autolease-van-centraal-beheer/">Autolease van Centraal Beheer,</a> allowing users to literally “talk” to their website. The agency replaced the company’s static navigation with conversation, making it easier for customers to use the site when they’re unable to manually browse for information. They can fill out forms simply by using their voice, making the company’s services more accessible. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://nxtds.com">NXT Digital Solutions Ltd </a>is also nominated for a dynamic CMS migration project for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.exclusive-networks.com/">Exclusive Networks</a>. NXT introduced Umbraco's Backoffice Agents to automate content tagging, publishing pipelines, and version control to resolve critical indexing failures that were affecting over 1,300 pages – making content more discoverable to search engines and users.<h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>Umbraco continues to introduce high-value tooling for its AI capabilities, and the alignment with Anthropic's Agent Skills is a sage move. By embedding an agent-ready architecture directly into its flexible and extensible CMS, it's moving beyond bolt-on assistants to guided, governed solutions – the kind that provide solid ground for faster and safer agent performance. As is evidenced by the use cases above, it's clear that Umbraco's partners are proving out the potential for how AI and agents can be successfully applied. My bet is that the “Two Phils” are seeing some innovative outcomes they weren't even anticipating. And I'm sure they would agree that's a good thing. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.06%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/cms-summit-26-logo.jpg" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-summit-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26">CMS Summit 26</a></h4>May 12-13, 2026 – Frankfurt, GermanyThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Summit brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Frankfurt, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26/tickets">so book your seats today.</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise-amsterdam/?utm_campaign=awareness-fy26&amp;utm_source=cms-critic&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;pi_campaign_id=117478"><img style="width:23.45%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/04/raise-logo-kontent.jpg" alt="" /></a><h4 id="raise-amsterdam"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise-amsterdam/?utm_campaign=awareness-fy26&amp;utm_source=cms-critic&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;pi_campaign_id=117478">RAISE Amsterdam</a></h4>May 20, 2026 – Amsterdam, NetherlandsSponsored by Kontent.ai, RAISE Amsterdam brings together bold marketing and technology leaders to explore how agentic AI is reshaping the way ambitious brands create and deliver content and what it takes to use it safely, responsibly, and with proper governance. Experience the ideas that are shaping the future and dive into big thinking, innovative strategies, and expert insights. Held at the Klein Canvas, Volkshotel, you'll hear from world-class speakers in dynamic sessions that will reveal how AI-powered content operations are accelerating production, improving governance, and driving creative impact. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise-amsterdam/?utm_campaign=awareness-fy26&amp;utm_source=cms-critic&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;pi_campaign_id=117478">Limited spots are available, so book yours today.</a> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a>

Level Up Your Agent Skills: Umbraco’s Agent-Ready Architecture Promises Faster, Safer Development

Matt & Matt, Episode 4: PLAY BALL! Adobe Summit at Bat, Optimizely, HubSpot, and AI Agents on Deck

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