Nick Gernert
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
43% of the top 10 million websites are powered by WordPress technology. You know, the next closest are in the single digits. It's not even close in terms of market share.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It's just, we'll come into an organization of a couple hundred thousand people and they'll say our existing technology, six people know how to update our digital properties at a 200,000. We've got six people internally that can touch this thing. And our goal is then like, how do we open that up? Like, how do we turn six into hundreds or thousands?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Because like the reality for marketers and organizations is if you've if you're trying to connect with your customers and you're trying to catch attention. You have to be doing this in a way where you're able to move quickly and you're able to engage authentically and directly. And usually the best way to do that is not through like six gatekeepers in the organization.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I don't know that I get to take all the credit, but you know, I'll take it right now. We'll assign it to you. That's fine. All right. Thanks. I appreciate that. Oh man. Uh, Nick, I appreciate you joining us. I'm excited to talk all things WordPress and you let's set the table for our audience. Let's give them a little bit of a, who Nick is both, uh,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so that's what we think actually, like WordPress and WordPress, you feel like brings a superpower into these big companies because it's like, get the rest of the stuff out of the way. You don't need the complexity.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
for complexity's sake um and so that gives me plenty of stuff to work on for the next i don't know decades because i feel like it's ingrained in these large companies that we need complex platforms and actually like the simplest solutions are the best solutions so yeah and in today's world like and it's it's like i just need to throw a landing page up you know
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Like, can we get the communication out there? You know, like, how fast does this have to be? And, you know, you've seen technologies like Canva and other things that have tried to, you know, democratize, you know, content development and landing page. And that's what I always...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
liked about WordPress is that you could do things quickly using and having, and the openness, you know, having the open source side and then all the plugins. So we're, you know, It's a wonderful thing when you guys, the way you guys are willing to work with so many other partners because so many other things need to talk to things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And that's what the great thing, like when a client comes to me and they do have maybe some complexity or whatever, that's why I'm always, you know. WordPress is top of mind. Cause I'm like, okay, it's the fastest to integrate. It has a plugin for that plugin for this. And some people get like their hair, like in a mess over all that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But like, that's what I've always liked about WordPress is the willingness to sort of partner with anyone to bring these integrations to life and seemingly do it in an open way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. And then you get to focus on actually solving new challenges. Like the most frustrating thing to me is like, when you've like come up with 10 different ways to integrate with In reality, you're like thousands of other organizations that have also needed to integrate with that CRM or that digital asset management platform or an ad platform or analytics or any number of things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so why spend the time recreating these elements and then actually spend the time on what are your business challenges? What are your business opportunities? How do you focus on those? Because authentication systems and CRMs are not... Value generating activities, CMS, creating your own CMS is not creating more value for your organization.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So how do you let this ecosystem and our organization help with solved problems? So you really just focus on business strategy and execution and your customers or your audiences. New problems. That's way more engaging anyway in doing that. So, yeah, that's the hope.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Nick Gernert. He is the CEO of WordPress VIP. Nick, you know, the elephant in the room whenever you're talking about content, AI, artificial intelligence. What's been the general trend? WordPress slash WordPress VIP slash automatic sort of corporate position on AI in general and even your own sort of position on how it's been coming to unfold the last couple of years? Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Look, I mean, I think our position is there's a lot that's exciting in this. And being perfectly honest, I'm also the person that wants to be really pragmatic on what are new approaches, new technologies, et cetera, bringing to the work we need to do. And how do we actually stay focused on the value of that and not just necessarily
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Because a lot of that complexity we were just talking about comes from the temptation to maybe chase trends and throw things in there and hope they actually make things better. But I think with AI, this is something that, and particularly generative AI, this idea that machines can generate text and images and video, et cetera, in ways that we have just not been able to do historically.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Beyond WordPress and maybe otherwise, you know, a little bit of your background.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
is exciting, especially when you think about, you know, our role as a content management system. So we're the source of record and creation for a lot of these things. So our position is like, what is the best of those two things coming together?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Because like anything you want to focus, you want to focus your people time on the most valuable activities and let the machines do like what they're well suited to do. This has been like the I mean, this is the
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Oh, man. All right. How much time we got? Thank you. Thank you. So, yeah. So it's great to be here. Thank you, Ryan. It's always fun to talk. Big fan of yours and what you've done over the years as well. So congrats on this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
history of technology in general is that we see a big technology shift and then we wonder if the status quo is forever changed and really we can look at like how it adapts into the future because like you know the role of a cms has been called into question many times over the years in terms of different waves of technology evolution um and we're still here and we're still very critical as part of this so i think from our perspective it's like how do we make humans more
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
How do we give them superpowers in this moment here in doing this? We don't see it, I don't see it, and I don't see it anytime near where there's a strategy where it's just like, look, we just let the machines now run our content strategies, our content creation, everything in that our approach and our view is very much like there's a human in the loop. This is human directed.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And then it's aided through a lot of these technologies here that actually help take care of a lot of things that historically have been time consuming or just not even done well. So you can think of like, Overly simplified things like image descriptions for accessibility, alt tags, things like this that we've had to do in web technology. Nobody likes to do that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And then we have certain parts of our audience suffering when it's not well taken care of. Those kinds of things are absolutely accelerated. The categorization and taxonomy around our content, way easier and way more streamlined with the help of things like what we're seeing translations and the acceleration of things like translations.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
This is, again, these are things that there are solutions for. We don't even have to build them all as like automatic or WordPress VIP. There's great organizations out there building these kinds of solutions today and like any anything with WordPress, it's like, oh, it just easily snaps into what I'm already doing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So we actually view ourselves as kind of a platform by which a lot of folks will just experience AI and maybe not even fully realize they're experiencing AI. It's just like, wow, the tool just works really well. on these tasks that I need to do around it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Some things we're doing uniquely, like we as WordPress VIP, we have a lot of analytics data that we have access to by virtue of some products that we provide. And so we're looking at how do we help our own customers take their analytics, their content performance, what has worked, et cetera, and how do we actually feed that into the content that is generated through AI?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
yeah so as you mentioned i'm the ceo of wordpress vip um which is a business that's within a much broader ecosystem that is the wordpress ecosystem that kind of what you know that i'm i'm very happy if 90 plus percent of your audience has immediate recognition of wordpress um you know i uh my background prior to you know the 11 years you just gave me credit for uh in this was
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
If you're looking at like, I want headlines or titles that perform better, we can actually help say based on historical performance, we'll write headlines in your tone of voice or your business tone, you know, based on your performance and we will recommend things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so we're looking at this as a way to say, we can start to get predictive on how to help customers understand what has worked historically and apply that to the future. And so we're looking at that as saying, how do we take our unique assets we have as an organization, which is a lot of data that otherwise you don't necessarily have access to, and how do
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So I think there's the other side of this is we actually went out to the market earlier this year and just said, like, hey, how are you applying AI in your workflow? And, you know, there was the response was, you know, about half of folks. And this is like just a couple months ago, about half of folks responded. We've experimented with AI in some way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And then about 10% are saying, I'm using it consistently. So we're still in this moment from an AI adoption standpoint where folks are, it's still very nascent on the consistent adoption and application of it. And so I think, again, part of how we're thinking about this is how do we just incorporate this into our product that supercharges an editor's experience, a content creator's experience?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
in a way where they might not even really realize they're working with AI necessarily. It's just helping them do their jobs that much more effectively. That's definitely going to be our focus for years to come here, rather than thinking that suddenly this shift makes the CMS irrelevant or the content creator irrelevant or anything else.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It's just going to make us more effective like any other technology shift we've seen in recent decades.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. It's interesting as you're talking about I was thinking like the evolution that you've witnessed being there 11 years with like mobile and the smartphone. And because I was thinking, OK, WordPress is this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
envelope or you know the carrier of content you know the and it carries the content and when that was a desktop experience that was one thing and it's still you still have these experience we have laptops and we're working on you know desktop experiences wherever that even if it's mobile but then you've got the mobile phone and education versus entertainment and the role of wordpress as the carrier of that like
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
a lot to unpack there but my brain just started to go down this rabbit hole nick like going nick's seen a lot through the evolution you know of how the web gets used and the device that it's on right yeah yes and like uh so your mobile example is a great one because you know in the earliest days of mobile like we carved off specific teams that focused on the mobile experience for like look you
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
You're the mobile team. You are the caretaker of this new paradigm. And it was a big unlock to think about like, okay, now I can reach an audience in a whole new place in a whole new way, et cetera. So you focused on that. And now we don't have a mobile team anymore.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Like mobile is just part of what we think about as part of like, well, we know half the audience is at least gonna be coming from a mobile device. So we need to make sure it works great in that context, in that use case. AI is going to be a similar thing here. It's like, wait, you know what? We do have AI teams carved off right now. And we're saying like, hey, go focus on this sort of new thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But, you know, give it a few years. This will just, we will settle into an understanding of like, all right, here's where the value is really accruing and generated in this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
and it's just part of the work we do it's not an and or a like another lane it's just another part of this paradigm so to your point like these fundamentals this evolution the more you just have like the very broad foundations that wordpress is built on it helps you adapt and say like okay something new is here we're going to focus on that for now and then it just becomes part
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
All digital agency comms, et cetera, on the practitioner side. So pretty much for my entire career leading up to this moment, I was working in digital agency at some level of it as a starting as a, as a freelancer all the way up into working into an, one of Omnicom's brands there. And so I have a really a deep love of the,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And then we'll be ready for the next thing and adapt to that, ideally.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. You guys are the FedEx of the delivery system, in a way. You've got to explain that. You know? But no matter what it is, I mean, I don't know. It comes through. I get this package analogy. That's the way my brain works. It's like the world on time. Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But it's the content delivered when you want it, where you want it without you having to think about necessarily like the best thing that FedEx can do is make you not know they exist because it's so ubiquitous. So there's no issues, right? We only worry only about those issues when the package doesn't get there. So if I never talk or think about FedEx, that means FedEx is doing their job.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Same thing almost with WordPress, because no matter what you're trying to get at the content, whether it's entertainment, education, uh, You know, whether it's the brochure or the TV show that's encapsulated video and encapsulated on the site, you know, no one needs to know you exist.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
You know, the least, you know, other than the corporate person that you work with, but the user experience, you know, so that's a fascinating kind of analogy, right? Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Totally agree with everything you're saying there. And and our job is well done when we kind of just fade into the back. And we and as long as we're enabling folks to do their jobs and as long as people can get what they need when they need it. Like that's the job well done. And it's not about us like having a visible spot somewhere in that stack.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Sometimes we market things, you know, like, and I'm a marketing guy. You know, I love putting monikers on things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Right. Well, I know that's the audience we're talking to right now. And that's part of our own challenge, honestly, is like, look, folks want to know about AI right now. And folks want to know what your product is doing. I don't think it's as much about AI. It's like folks want to know, like, what are you doing to keep up with the pace of change?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And like, please talk to me about how you're shifting with AI.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
uh change and so ai is that lens we view it through right now but it's like how adaptable are you really and um and so uh so you're right and we it's like you need to talk about it we need to talk about it through the lens by which people are viewing things and also i don't want to overstate that somehow this is an entirely new product this becomes something that actually takes something you've already been doing
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
and improves upon it in ways that are really exciting and haven't been transformed this way in many years. So just an exciting shift in the work.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
How do you think Because when I go, I start thinking websites and WordPress, and my mind gets pretty fast probably being a digital agency guy, like SEO. And I think not only like, okay, within WordPress optimization of SEO that could be done with, you know, machine learning and AI and all that sort of thing. but also the user experience for how people are searching today.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It's kind of like twofold. And how do you guys think about SEO within the landscape of the product and just overall with everything happening with AI?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
application of technology in general, but also I'm a product of kind of growing up in the 90s when the web was in its infancy. And it was something that I got access to really at some pivotal moments in my life and have been fortunate to build a career around helping folks navigate the web. So a lot of my work
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. So, I mean, the foundation is... WordPress has had SEO sort of at its core since its earliest days that in most cases we'll see folks migrate into the platform and immediately see a dramatic SEO improvement just because of all the care and attention that's gone into how documents get structured and delivered. It's just a very SEO friendly way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
The most exciting thing we're working on as a business right now that's AI related is related to back linking. So one of the things that drives authority from an SEO, and you know this, is what points to what and what authority, how can you take high authority things and point them to something so that it also then gets more authority.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So one of the things we've actually been working on from an SEO standpoint is how do we take, so you can do like we do Google Search Console integrations into our products. So our customers can start to feed Google Search Console data into our platform. So immediately we start to already know like a lot of the insights around SEO.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And what we're then doing at the time of something being published, so you go out, you're going to publish our interview here today. And you're like, I've got, what I want to do is I want to get this thing ranking well for AI and content or something like this. And I know I posted some things years ago about CMS or whatever. And what we'll quickly do is go into your archives.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
We'll match up your highest authority, existing content and say, you need to insert links to this new thing in this content. And we'll walk you through a workflow by which you can go about and do that. And then at the global enterprise scale, we're actually then saying, Hey, we'll actually go do that across a network of sites.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So you might have one.com here, but actually you probably run a hundred websites with us. So we'll actually go through your entire catalog and say, how could you relate across your entire catalog of content to these new things? And so, and that is that this, the accuracy and the efficacy of this has been unlocked in a new way, thanks to AI technology.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And just how quickly you can do this and how accurately you can do this. That for me, it's probably the most exciting thing. Like, yes, we're also doing things. It's like generate me an SEO friendly or headline and things like this from a document construction standpoint. That's great.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
This just like supercharges it in a new way that I, at least I'm not seeing anyone else right now is able to really do this kind of thing. Um, so that's definitely one of the things that has me most excited about like
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I wrap my head around that the moment you said it. Like, yeah, like that, that's big. And that is, I have not heard of anyone else connecting those dots.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And it does, I mean, back linking for SEO value for anyone listening, like there's an SEO specialist, like your SEO, where you fall in those search rankings are driven by a lot of things, but two really the most important things, the content, right? and the relevance of that content and the keywords that are used that are highly searched when people are looking for that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And then the sometimes lesser known is the backlinking from authoritative sites that have high domain authority that are linking back to your content and your website raises your SEO value. And what Nick is saying is they're making that a lot fucking easier with, uh, So practical use. Practical use, yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
On the agency side, leading up to bringing me into VIP, just happened to be with really large brands sort of as I was kind of in the final years of my agency side. And there's this really interesting dynamic that some really large brands that were more daring in how they were trying to engage with their customers.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And hopefully an improved user experience too. So if I land on one of your old piece of content, I'm like, oh, great. Actually, there's an updated thing on this as well. So it's SEO and ideally an improved user experience as well along the way. So thank you for validating us on the like that you think is also potential.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
valuable that is very valuable for the right people and if it isn't valuable to them it means they don't know or understand how valuable it is and i don't mean and i'm not being harsh i'm just direct people this is an opinion show on some level so uh you're gonna get mine uh if you don't know that's valuable call me Nick and I will hook you up. There you go. I love it. I love it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Talking to Nick Gernert. He's the CEO of WordPress VIP. Who doesn't want to be a VIP? Very important person. I like being a VIP. Nick. You know, staying on that search train just a little bit with AI, it's interesting, you know, with ChatGPT and, you know, asking things. Are you guys seeing or you have data that supports? I mean, you guys have so much data.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I can't even imagine how much data, like, information you guys have. It makes my head want to explode. But that's why the computers get to do it for us. But, like, user... How much use it goes like almost like the, you know, people Googling or chat GPT like you guys seeing those kind of trends and that data and reacting in any way to it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
yeah so i mean there's a few things here i mean like i think on one end um what's informing these models tends to be a lot of the content that's been created and exists across the web and so i think we've been helping folks navigate attention of like what's fair use of my content you know so and we're trying to help at a platform level like look if you want to restrict certain things or whatever like we want to help you there and make sure you've got those types of things and i think
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I think the website and web in general will have a significant role to play for the foreseeable future in what informs the responses and what is considered fact and opinion, et cetera, comes from these sources. Yes, there's a certain amount of training models against those things, but I don't see it usurping the importance of the sources anytime soon.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
We're helping folks navigate fair use of their content. Your point on what are we seeing from a trend standpoint in terms of consumption, we were asking ourselves over the summer, was the introduction of AI summaries on Google, was that leading to a decline in Google referral traffic to our customer websites?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Were people searching, they got the answer in that synopsis, and then they never actually clicked the blue link anymore? I think that's the big fear that folks are worried about at the moment. That's the most kind of pressing concern is where is that? We dug into a bunch of data around this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And overall, right now, we're actually seeing referral traffic from Google to the websites that we look at, which we're looking across a couple hundred million visitors every day. So it's a significant amount of traffic. Google referral traffic is actually increasing right now.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So think of this as like a time when social media marketing and things like this were still really trying to, brands were trying to wrap their head around it. And so we were working with really ambitious brands on how they could engage with their customers in a new and exciting way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So in aggregate, and then if you've got to kind of peel that back, there's disparity though between the size of the organization. What we're seeing is like the bigger you are as an organization, kind of to your point, the better you are at navigating SEO, relevancy, et cetera. So you might have teams you can dedicate to this more than the smaller players.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so we are seeing a bit of a, it's not as evenly distributed from big to smaller in that spread. So that gives us more of an impetus to say, how do we help folks navigate this, despite whether or not they have massive teams that can stay on top of these things or not.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So what we're seeing is like, look, if you're able to engage and build great content, backlink it, relate it, do all the things that help you, you're maintaining at least, or even growing audience right now. And so we're gonna continue to monitor this and watch this and just help folks navigate what may or may not change in this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I think there's a healthy, there's a well-earned healthy amount of skepticism towards Google at the moment. And how much should I rely on them for traffic? And as a platform that directs people to me, I think that's fair. They are a very important source of traffic though.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And I think it's both like leveraging that and also thinking about like, how do you, how do you have a strategy that doesn't make you overly dependent on any one particular technology? Cause it's, I mean, you know this better than I was like the over dependency on anyone's social platform.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
or search or chat GPT or anything else might help you in a, you know, six to 12 month time horizon and may really hurt you on a multi-year trajectory if you're trying to think long-term. So same rules still apply. How do you have like a, well, how do you hedge against over depreciation?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
your business we're trying to help folks navigate that because we think we as WordPress and something that is open we're not a platform that owns your data or you or anything else you actually own all of these things we're here to help you kind of navigate that and and have a stronger owned presence on the web yeah that's you nailed the word there at the end but I was going to go is like rented versus own land and I've always seen WordPress because I'll say this to people
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
whether it's social media or other entities, YouTube even. And look, take advantage of the platforms. I'm not a hater on the walled gardens, but just know that's rented land and not owned land. And WordPress may sell products and services, but they are part of the good guy owned land territory. And I've always coached that via your website.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
and there was a lot of wordpress that we ended up recommending that customers use and so wordpress this big open source community movement i'm part of a company that was started by the creator of wordpress a guy named matt this company automatic that i'm part of as wordpress vip
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
needs to be your own property, your newsletter, your website, your content. You've got to own it and have places that it lives in sort of your yard and not your neighbors or the beach house you're renting down the street. That could go away at any time, right? One good storm away from gone, so yeah. Nick, as we close out here, you know, What are you seeing?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
We've talked about the trends with AI, pragmatically improving experiences on the web, things that WordPress are doing. Maybe for our listeners, what are maybe some practical things that you're seeing in WordPress?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
corporate business website, like go to market strategies these days, or just like, what are some trends or things that are real that are using your pragmatic approach that you think people should be thinking about as they maybe embark on a new site or a new project within a web experience, those kinds of things, anything top of mind is sort of some actionable things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
so um yeah i mean i think look i think we're in a moment here where it's a great opportunity to reassess just what are you investing in those in your own channels um right now and so i think actually one of the challenges is are folks even embarking on this journey that you're describing which is Am I looking at these on channels?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Am I investing in them, whether that is in microsites for a particular audience or like our broader digital presence? Because I think there's never been a better time to really think about your investments in your own space of web and digital. And you're naming all these things from newsletter because no one can own how you distribute into somebody's inbox to web and website.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
There's a reason these things have had a resurgence in recent years because we've seen really the dynamics of platforms and who controls what in terms of an audience really get called into question. And as a large organization that's highly dependent on these connections to your customers and your audiences, it's chilling to think that that can easily be cut off.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so the trend and the thing that we're seeing folks value is just how do I invest more in this? Because one of the trends that we see and that we've heard from people is like more than half of folks wants to get their information from a source that's not a social platform.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But yet, interestingly, those same folks are saying like, yeah, more than half the time, I'm just going to social and getting this information. And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that the experiences on the own side have been neglected and are not nearly as platforms and things like this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And that's not to say that everyone needs to recreate the platforms, but you need to be investing in experiences for your own customers that actually are generating positive customer experiences. And you can do this in your own channels and you can do this there.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But folks, so that is for me, the thing that I would, I would just encourage everyone to be revisiting right now is how much are you investing in that because there's long term returns on that. And some of our most successful customers on the enterprise side are the ones that five years ago, even pre-pandemic,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
in the channels we own and the content we drive to those channels, we're going to own more of a relationship with our customers. And those were the folks that navigated like the, you know, a shutdown to entire digital and, you know, in early 2020 and then emerging from that now have navigated from that the best and the strongest. So it's like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It started to really help support the broader open source ecosystem, but 11 or so years ago, Automatic didn't really have this business that was focused on some of the largest customers that could really serve some of the biggest use cases. Biggest brands, large, thorny public sector rollouts and things like this that you might do. And yet that was already happening.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Best times today or second best time is today. It's same sort of thing. I think like the, the, the time to invest in your own strategy is, Would have been five years ago, but start today would be my encouragement.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I think we need to start a new campaign. There's no political affiliation here at all, but you'll get where I'm going here, Nick. Let's make websites great again. I know that conjures up a feeling no matter where you fall politically, but I'm serious though, Nick. It's sort of like...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It's as you were talking, I'm sitting here going, when's the last time I went into a website and really was surprised and delighted? Yeah, it's been a while. And it's time to like surprise and delight again on the web.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. The web is a wonderful and beautiful, weird place where you can do these really creative and inventive things that no one necessarily gets to control those bounds. And I think we've lost some of that and more of a homogenized experience.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
The cookie cutter, you know, you're within those walled gardens and you've got your profile and people are learning about you, but you can't bring your brand completely to life. Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And maybe we'll start a site. I mean, we just start a site and it's like highlighting really great things that folks are doing with the web right now because there are some really great examples of great experiences that folks are investing in and building. So maybe you've given me an idea of like we just need inspiration.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
We need some inspiration, Nick. That's what it is. Let's inspire. That's what this is about. Inspire web greatness on your own branded properties with Nick Gernert and WordPress VIP. Nick, it's been a pleasure, brother. Where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing, learn more about WordPress VIP, et cetera?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah, you can find us WPVIP.com. You can find me on just about any channel by my name, Nick Garner. You'll find me over there or WordPress VIP all over the typical networks you look at as well. So find us all there. And I really appreciate the time. This has been a ton of fun. We're very aligned on many of the things that could be great here, so I appreciate it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I think there should be some partnership or something on this. I'd love to have you back on the show regularly, Nick. Hey, guys, you know where to find us, ryanisright.com. We're bringing together all the best in business and marketing here on the show. Nick and everything you're doing over at WordPress, look, don't be on rented land. You've got to get that own land where it needs to be.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Go check out WordPress VIP. We'll have the show notes where we link to all the content from today, Nick's information and WordPress VIP. You can follow me on all the social channels that Ryan offered. You'll see that blue check before you can buy it. We'll see you next time on Right About Now.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
We were doing that as part of my work when I was at Omnicom and things like this. So 11 or so years ago, I had some discussions with Matt, others at Automatic, and said, you know, like there's a whole market out here that WordPress already exists in some capacity. It could just be a lot bigger. We should really try to build that. You know, if you wanted to build a business around that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And I think the response at the time was like, yeah, it sounds interesting. Maybe we should build, you know, let's if we can try to explore something like that. And so joined automatic on a pretty loose charter to try to look at, like, how could you take something like WordPress online?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
that was known for blogging and personal websites and a million other things across the web and say, now as maybe some of the biggest brands in the world, you could, you could trust this as well. Um, so that started 11 years ago and they've kept me around at least this long. So, uh, I feel like we're doing some things right. Having a lot of fun. So, um, and now I get to chat with you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So, um, it gets us over simplified view to today.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah. And you know, Nick, I think, um, I do think our audience knows the name WordPress, and I think it's interesting as you think about the history of websites and you think about, I don't know why, and I've been in digital. I'm a traditional digital guy. They call us something like, I'm not a native digital.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about now. We're always getting right here today. You know, sometimes, Nick, we have people on and they're doing some amazing things. And they're doing things with brands that you've never heard of.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I was probably native analog, but now a lot of my adult career in digital, both sides of it. But definitely always been on the, I think, the forefront of digital innovation and technology. Because even the clients that I had working at big agencies were all in that space. And what we were selling was technology.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And watching the evolution of WordPress and from the blogging platform to really the go-to CMS for most people. Definitely mid-market agencies and clients to – all the way up to like what you're talking about, corporate level, as the sort of transition and evolution from that – I don't know. I think of almost like MySpace, you know, back – like as the –
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
The evolution, though, is like if MySpace had made it into the booming company that WordPress did, like because they evolved the right way or something, you know, WordPress went from the blogger to the small, you know, everyday person to what became and is still for even us as an agency, our go-to kind of CMS for clients that need...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
functionality, but something that's workable for a mid-level market, you know, client. It's been fascinating to sort of watch that evolution of the company, you know, and I'm sure you've been had a seat right at the table. Yeah, a seat right at the table. Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I mean, WordPress started in 2003. So just think about what devices were we using in 2003? A really crappy PC or a shiny Mac. Yeah, like a PC.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But I don't know if that was that age on the IMAX or what. Those first IMAX came out like 2005-ish, maybe, I think. The ones that were cool that swiveled like the, you know. Yeah, to make me feel old.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But, you know, to think about where we were there and then where we are today. And WordPress has been this. It's been along through that and continued to grow. Market share still, like, inches up. It's harder once you reach a certain scale. I mean, that number, that's a big number. You keep moving up.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Let's go ahead and tell it, Dick. That's a good one. What is it?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
technologies you've never heard of but there's a word that i think i would guess 97 percent of our audience probably knowing why we know our audience pretty well they know it it's wordpress he's the ceo of wordpress vip nick earnert what's up nick hey well hello how are you
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So, you know, exactly.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Category king WordPress. It is obvious CMSs and it's known for that. And so you guys have worked hard for that. It's what's that? Yeah. Talk about working for a company that has, you know, that market share and then bringing to life sort of even a new, not new category, but it is a new category for y'all. Like, you know, dominant CMS overall, but again...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
bringing to life the brand for corporate to kind of go direct to. Cause that was that, that transition is kind of what I was kind of building to all this, the MySpace and all that is you're at this level and everybody respects you, you're doing that, but then trying to be the corporate, you know, King, so to speak or go to, I mean, was that a hard transition to get people to make mentally? Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Uh, yes.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So I, you know, the corporate Kings and Queens, we're like the, this, this transition for us, um, I mean, that's, that, that was the opportunity as, as coming into the business because as ubiquitous as WordPress is on the web, it's not in that corporate sense. It was, there was niche adoption of WordPress from a, like, Oh, we use it for the corporate blog.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Like one of these examples was like Boeing, you know, like a pilot named Randy. He was blogging, he leveraged WordPress, but it was in no way like the corporate homepage or anything like, you know, that was core to business operations. It was like, yeah, that's fine as a side project. And really the whole vision was like, how would you legitimize this thing?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
So it's not just playing a second or tertiary role in the enterprise, it's playing like a primary business aligned role at the center. And so a big challenge for us How do you take something that is as ubiquitous as WordPress, but also ubiquitously known for its blogging and maybe more consumer and small business and up to mid-market?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But then there's a mental model that says it's good to a point, but not for this point sort of thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so a lot of where we end up focusing in that transition and where we focused as a business was like, I'll talk about it like food, shelter, water of like the hierarchy of needs of enterprises is like at that base, you have to be able to speak authoritatively around security, compliance, reliability, etc. Like last night, I think was a big night for a lot of web traffic here.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And that's I know that. folks will uh view this but we're chatting here today uh after last night was election night here in america there's a lot of organizations that rely on our platform through a night like that it's like how are you how do we reassure them that we are ready to go from traffic and everything else that's going to come in sort of that critical moment that you don't get back
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
It's like that moment goes past, you can't rewind the tape and then, all right, we fixed it. Let's try it again. It's just gone. So we had to invest heavily in just that foundation there. And then there's everything you know about like working with large organizations. That's the intangibles of like, How do you show up as an account team?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
great man thanks for joining yeah man i you say the word wordpress yeah you know it's like people know what wordpress is they they know websites you don't have to uh i don't have things especially if you're talking to marketing people or are digital or just somewhat in the landscape uh i think we've heard of wordpress so uh carrying the brand for 11 plus years. Good job.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
How do you show up as understanding their business needs, their objectives? How do you then meet them there so that whatever software we're providing, and as much as I want to have, say, software as the solution to everything, really, I think 70% of it's people. And that's actually one of the strengths of WordPress is that it's so centered around people and creating access for people.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
The 30%, actually, that technology impacts in the organization, we do really well. But how do we really bring people together? Because so much of actual success in digital and everything else is like, can you access the tools? Can you access your audience? Can you access your customers, et cetera? And so much of the...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
existing market from my perspective prevents that actually doesn't enable that so we're like how can we open that up how do we focus on opening that up so that our transition is really like how do you take something that the web at large has accepted and said this thing's great fit for purpose but enterprises have a bit of skepticism around that we've you know been spending 11 years and we'll continue to spend many many many more years trying to really help serve that market and adapt as you know who knows what happens in the next 20
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And it's interesting, I can say this being on the agency side, and I've worked at some of the largest agencies in the world and now own my own boutique shop. Like, sometimes we try to make things complicated. Like, it seems like some of these platforms and CMSs that I think are starting to wind down, I hope they are, God, they're so complex. And so, like, I feel like...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I don't know this, but I've always been skeptical. They're complex for complex sake. That's always been what I loved about WordPress is, yeah, you got to learn it and get your way around it, but it's meant to be easy but robust. It's way better than your off-the-shelf platform as far as you needing it to talk with this code or this plug-in and all the stuff that it can do. but it's manageable.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
But I feel like these corporate, you know, because we've worked with some corporate clients, they bring us in, they're using this platform. I'm like, why in God's earth are we, what are we on and why? And it's like, everything is like pulling teeth. Is it, is it, is that like just to protect the agency or why the hell has it got to be so hard, Nick? You know what I'm talking about.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I'm not going to name any names, but you know, it's just like, Oh, yeah. We're on a corporate CMS. It's insert name here. And it's like you get behind the hood and it's like, Jesus, like, yeah. Yeah. Jesus.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Like it's words like digital transformation and all these things were architected in a way to create massive budgets to extract a bunch from an organization that was looking for a solution to a problem that they really didn't understand. Right. in the first place.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And so I definitely lament, I think like as, you know, going back and being the product of someone who came up in the earliest days of the web, there's actually like a beautiful simplicity behind how the web actually works. That when you fast forward to today and look at all the layers that now have been created in the stack,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
I just like completely sympathize and empathize with marketers and others that have to think about how do I, what is the MarTech stack? What is the web stack that I bring together? My developers are telling me we need to do this thing and use these technologies. My executives are telling me these analysts are recommending this highly complex and an enterprise level solution.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
And usually when we say enterprise level, it's like they're overly complex, heavy handed, massive suites of things that you don't end up using. And that's the status quo. And from my perspective, it's like that beautiful simplicity. You're like preaching to the choir here on from a WordPress perspective. perspective is like, how can we, that's how we show up differently.