The SEO-era CMS is dead. Here's what comes next.

Search visibility still matters. But the next advantage is making content structured, attributable, and maintainable. WordPress became the dominant CMS by solving a real problem: making it easy to publish crawlable, keyword-targetable content. Install Yoast, fill in the meta description, hit publish. Google does the rest. That playbook still works — but it's no longer sufficient. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude a question, the answer isn't a list of ten blue links. It's a synthesised response drawn from sources that were readable, attributable, and trustworthy. Your content either makes it into that synthesis — or it doesn't. The right question isn't "how do we optimise for AI?" That framing chases the wrong things. The better question is: what does it mean for content to be genuinely legible in 2025? What "legible" actually means Legibility isn't a new concept. It's what good semantic HTML has always been about — content that's meaningful to the medium it travels thro