The Original Promise
When we started RebelMouse over a decade ago, it was founded on the promise to keep websites modern. I’m so proud of what we’ve done for our clients to deliver on that promise year after year.
Staying modern means asking:
- What does it mean strategically?
- What does it mean technically?
- What does it mean editorially, from a content perspective?
All of those things shift together, and they shift rapidly.
What our clients pay for, essentially, through a monthly services retainer and license fees, is the ability to have a partner that is proactively understanding the changes happening on the web, what those changes mean they should do, and helping them get it done, either by themselves, with their own developers, or through our creative agency team.
This year in particular, staying modern has never mattered more. It has never been more confusing, exciting, or scary. There has never been so much risk in being left behind, and there has never been so much opportunity in getting ahead.
A Step Change in Technology
As we find ourselves in the summer months in New York, I want to talk about what we’ve done so far in 2026 to stay modern.
When I think about the changes we’ve been developing for, it started in late 2025, particularly December, when Anthropic and OpenAI released new coding models across Claude and Codex, respectively. That suddenly and dramatically changed the technology landscape for everyone.
The whole tech world is still catching up to that change, and will be for some time, because it’s a true step change. In many ways, it’s equivalent to the release of the iPhone, social media, or internet-based search. Adapting to it is exciting, but it’s also confusing, and it carries real obstacles.
RebelMouse AI and Low-Cost Website Creation
We released a new product, which you can try at RebelMouse AI, for people to create low-cost websites using AI and generative AI.
Our differentiator is that we help people through the training process. We understand technical SEO and how to make sure a site performs well across search. We have a great team to support that, and we’ve seen some really beautiful usage of the tool.
We’re an enterprise-focused company, but this product allows us to learn a lot while also giving access to people with smaller budgets, companies working on individual projects, and teams within larger departments.
Building the Agentic CMS
What we’ve really been working on is the Agentic CMS.
To build it, we had to tackle the same problems that most of the world is now encountering as it uses Claude and Codex to transform how code is written. Problems like hallucinations, overloaded AGENTS.md training files with so many directions that the system stops paying attention, and the huge black box that occurs when you ask for changes, spend tokens fixing things, break other things, and then spend more tokens fixing those issues.
Our technical team has been using these tools ourselves and transforming the amount of engineering capacity we have. Combined with deep technical understanding and strategic vision, we’re now releasing the enterprise version of this for our CMS.
- You can have millions of pieces of content spread across a site.
- You can have many templates that need different variations and optimizations.
- You can manage changes, not through the old method of asking an account manager or project manager to coordinate with a developer and designer, but rather by simply chatting.
This all transforms what’s possible for a website to do.
The Agentic OS
To make this possible, we built an agentic operating system that allows for very specific workflows to be created, visualized, and debugged.
Underneath the covers is our Layout & Design Tool that has been transformed using the latest agentic technology. The original tool is very powerful and still used in a traditional way by some of our customers, but that won’t be true for long since the agentic version is so delightful and powerful to use in comparison.
We’ve also figured out how to make sure the results are predictable. The system can do what it’s expected to do every time, that it’s not changing code in other places unexpectedly, and that it’s well directed enough to be used within an enterprise environment.
Enterprise Workflows, Personalization, and Subscriptions
We’re currently working with our biggest clients on how to implement these agentic workflows, consolidate CRM data, and personalize experiences.
Through this work, we’ve built a new subscriptions and engagement product. Anyone that prioritizes building user loyalty can add it on top of their site and provide deep personalization, either with or without a charge to their users.
Whatever a company offers, e.g., content, products, partners, or something else, that personalized data can now flow to users in a way that is easy to deploy, customize, and analyze. And it has an agentic interface that lets teams talk to it, configure it, report on it, and optimize it.
This product also supports subscriptions and paywalls. For publishers and others creating something valuable enough for people to pay for, we make that possible in a very easy way. You can have complete ownership of the design and complete flexibility to do whatever you’d like — not like the constraints of other platforms, such as Substack — with the ease and simplicity of adding your own payment layer on top.
An Agentic Editorial Experience
We’re also releasing the agentic version of our content editor.
You can do anything you would expect from platforms like ChatGPT or Whisper AI. Speak voice notes into it and ask it to help you create content. But it’s also trained for the context of publishing, with structured data, SEO optimization, and an understanding of the opportunities that matter to publishers built in and prioritized.
This allows our clients to use chat not only to make changes to their websites, subscription boxes, and product experiences, but also to improve content.
It can handle major publishing problems caused by tags and duplicate tags. Agents can work constantly to improve SEO scores, as measured by tools such as Semrush.
SEO, AEO, and Becoming the Source
SEO has never been more important, and we’re working with our clients because answer engine optimization (AEO) is now vital.
There are things outside of our control, such as the way Reddit and Quora — particularly Reddit — are mined for data and used to train AI answers. There’s nothing we can do technologically on Reddit’s side, though strategically we do have recommendations.
What’s possible is to leapfrog competitors on SEO, have the right structured data and rankings, and become the training data, source, click-out, and reference in AEO.
As a reminder, AEO is the optimization of what generative AI platforms are saying. When a customer asks ChatGPT or Claude for a recommendation, the goal is for your brand/product to be recommended.
Moving Faster Than Ever
We’ve never been able to move so fast with such a small team. What we do in a week would have taken us three months last year.
We’re seeing an incredible acceleration of what’s possible, and our clients are seeing more than ever the value of having a sherpa, so to speak, to guide them through this very confusing moment in technology.
We believe the transformation is only beginning.
The Conversational Web
As we begin to trust that generative agents, with the right access to the right tools, are actually the experience we prefer, the whole concept of combing through a website’s UX to find what you need is going to vanish quickly.
It will become a conversational interface that allows you to simply ask for what you need.
We’re helping our clients balance both worlds. You can’t move entirely away from the old user experience yet because people still expect it. So we help deliver that experience while also building new features on top of it that are useful to customers.
A Modern CMS Without a Migration
We’re very excited about all of these changes and upgrades.
What’s especially powerful for our current clients is that they don’t need a new migration, new hires, or an entirely new system. They simply need to stay close with us as we implement the changes we’ve built into our CMS platform, help them use those features, and customize them.
We anticipate that in the second half of the year, our technology capabilities will accelerate even further.
RebelMouse Labs
We’ve also launched RebelMouse Labs, where we’re working with companies we believe in to help them build viral products.
I worked with The Huffington Post, Avaaz before it, The Dodo, and Axios. For those looking for a technology partner to be strategic in what is probably a vibe-coding startup, we now have the capacity to build that as a partnership together.
Still Delivering on the Same Promise
I’m incredibly proud that, well over a decade later, our company is still delivering on the same thing we originally set out to do: Keep your website modern, with a cutting-edge CMS that always learns from and incorporates the latest innovations and expectations.
So, if you haven’t taken a look yet (or in a while), we promise that our calls are strategic and worth a bit of your time. We listen to your problems, pain points, and hopes. Then we show you how those problems can be solved, how those goals can be achieved, and how we can help do that for you.
