3538: How Storyblok Sees Content Strategy Changing in an AI First Internet

[00:00:03] What happens when the old rules of search begin to collapse and customers stop visiting your website altogether? It's kind of a strange moment that we all find ourselves in right now, especially as traffic can fall while sign-ups rise. And we're entering a period where an AI model becomes the most influential visitor to your content.

[00:00:25] So the big question is, how do you keep your brand visible when people are asking questions to an AI agent instead of browsing for results? This is a question I want to get into with my guest today. He's the co-founder of a company called Storyblok, spelled S-T-O-R-Y-B-L-O-K. And he brings a front row view of how AI is rewriting content strategies.

[00:00:50] He will explain today why outdated pages are now a real risk, why LLMs scrape everything they can find, and why brands that leave old content untouched are essentially training AI to misrepresent them. It's a real wake-up call, this one, but also in a surprisingly practical way. Because Dominic will break down why headless content systems are no longer a niche choice.

[00:01:18] They provide a single source of truth that LLMs can scrape more accurately. And in doing so, help teams keep consistency across every channel and support a new discipline that he calls GEO, the rising counterpart to SEO. And he'll bring all that to life with examples on automation, intelligent recommendations, and a joyful content design that genuinely shifts how you might think about the future of CMS.

[00:01:49] So, settle in for a conversation that blends curiosity with a bit of holiday season clarity. And as you listen today, ask yourself, how well would your content hold up if an AI model inspected each and every page that you've ever published? Before I bring today's guest on, a quick thank you to my friends over at Denodo, who are passionate about logical data management for AI success. Because let's be honest, AI is evolving fast.

[00:02:19] But the elephant in the room is initiatives are still failing. Not because the models aren't good, but because the data foundation isn't ready. That's why organisations are increasingly turning to Denodo and logical data management. Denodo unifies your data across every cloud and every system without the need for massive replication. So, you can power trustworthy AI, accelerate lake house optimisation,

[00:02:47] and build data products that make self-service real for every team. So, CIOs, architects, business leaders each get exactly what they need and when they need it. And Denodo's partners also help you get value even faster. So, if you're ready to make AI actually work, visit Denodo.com and put logical data management to work today. But now, let's get today's guest on. So, a massive warm welcome to the show.

[00:03:15] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? So, my name is Dominic Anger, one of the two founders of Storyblock. And we're a content management system, a so-called hatless content management system. So, we provide APIs for developers to build all kinds of things. Be it just a website or a native application, virtual reality applications, or powered next AI content model, or AI bot or AI agent, however you want to call it, with your content. so that's what we do called the management system for some of the largest prints in the world

[00:03:45] and you work in such an exciting space and i think there'll be so many people listening hearing about ai and they've heard all the hype but real practical measures of how ai could transform their content management or what features their business could be demanding to stay competitive in 2026 which is literally a couple of weeks away now so i'm curious from everything that you're seeing here how is ai powering the next generation of content content

[00:04:13] management systems or cms from intelligent automation to advanced content personalization what are you seeing here what excites you so the number one exciting thing for me is the whole potential for automation uh for sure i mean we also have launched something called storyblock flow motion that will be generally available next year for basically everybody it's based on n at n so if you want to use something similar right now and it and an amazing automation and ai agent orchestration platform it's quite a mouthful but at the same time what it means is you have different

[00:04:43] nodes that you can visually connect and you have an ai agent take up small tasks in between so you have best of both worlds you can either fully do magic which most of us experience with ai or you can have it do a little bit more predictable kind of tasks that you you apply to it and now having that companion in your own content management system it's just amazing so that's what we did with flow motion you have the full power of edit and directly in storyblock going forward as well and i believe that's going to be quite interesting because it's not about creating more content and more and more

[00:05:13] and more content it's about creating better content high quality content and that will change because right now yeah is actually destroying a little bit of the content space now why and for the last yeah i'm 31 now but for the last 20 years everybody tried to go towards being number one at google that's the number one spot everybody wanted to do and we've seen some studies that not just traffic

[00:05:40] declined by 15 but also about 58 of all google searches are resulting in no clicks whatsoever because of the i over views and all the different things that are now happening and that means that the customers that create content they have a completely different challenge right now versus like a year ago or two years ago because of the customer behavior actually changing they are not clicking for search results they are just getting a generated answer so suddenly it's not oh how can

[00:06:07] it be just the number one in google it's also about how can i get mentioned with the actual right content by all those answer engines be it like in jgbt perplexity claude or google summary and that's the interesting part because on one hand we can use the eye to generate content and make it more brand aware like we have an ai branding feature that allows you to stay on brand once you explain of like who

[00:06:31] we are which tone you want to use and how you want to be perceived but at the same time it's it's a world right now where consistency of content suddenly matters and funny enough i mentioned we are headless content management system the reason we build storyblock as a headless content management system where we remove the display layer from the actual content hasn't been because of the eye we have done that

[00:06:55] eight years ago but the reason was is there is to get you consistency across different platforms so you manage your content once in just storyblock essentially as a content hub and then you use the same content in your application on a screen in your digital signage on your website in your intranet even share it with for party publications or similar if they want to have access to it but it's one system that powers those for apis and the result of that headless approach is that it's consistent

[00:07:25] and turns out llms are statistical models right so to rank higher the all the easiest thing for you to do is to appear consistent because then the statistical relevance is higher and it's so interesting because now we see both sides of the eye on the one hand it's enabling you to do more and stay more consistent and create better content faster on the other hand you're fighting against whatever it tells people about you so it's a really nice twist of both the right directions right now there's so

[00:07:55] many great points and we're recording this right in the heart of the holiday season and i suspect everybody listening here are going to be searching for gifts and in the old way as you said you'd be searching for a particular item or trying to brainstorm ideas and you'd end up with a page one of google full of sponsored results that are completely irrelevant and of no use but companies have paid a lot of money to be on that front page of google but this holiday season even though it'll be busier than ever people

[00:08:25] are going elsewhere instead of searching for information they're asking questions about things they want they might be able to ask for personalized gifts for example on something like chat gpt or claude or google gemini or whichever one that they use so is this something that you're seeing in your own behavior in the behavior of your customers and are they asking you for for help with this stuff as that penny starting to drop that the old way is is slowly dying or evolving into something else

[00:08:54] yeah the bios journey is completely changing and we see it on our own software as well even software it's not just products it's everywhere because funny enough we have more signups to storyblock than ever and active users with that as well but at the same time traffic on our website declined and the reason for that is quite simple and it's actually actually a little bit scary but at the same time it's actually

[00:09:19] simple because what happens is that people are trying to find answers of what to use for certain users like um use cases so let i want to build internet in the past people tried to find uh like different like search results they tried to find those results on google they opened the first free websites and tried to scan through them see if it fits their needs or not maybe go for the fourth fifth

[00:09:44] sixth page as well and make their own immediate conclusion okay let's do that so they visited the website what we can see now already right now is that many of developers that start trying to play around within ucms they go into chat gpt or complexity or in claude and literally write in here i want to build a website multilingual with few chats or react or any kind of technology uh what's your

[00:10:10] recommendation and then there's a list of free oh yeah create me an account for storyblock or literally just click on the on a button that opens app.storyblock.com which is not a website but our application and suddenly they skip our complete website they've never visited the website but they register and work on the system because they just want to try something and then they experience it and like it usually at least with our system and suddenly the website is not the main entry point

[00:10:37] anymore but it's just this like information holder for ei and that's interesting part because the same thing can also be really negative because if you're not in the recommendation or if you're not in the result of that answer that is given to the potential customer or the answer is wrong because you have outdated content for example if you want to buy a car and the the car has different prices over the years and it has changed if you have your price lists online for the last 10 years

[00:11:04] and no exact dates associated to the price i can guarantee you that whatever is going to be pushed out to any customers of like say the car it will be not the price you currently have it will be a random hallucination from any price that might have been there in the last 10 years if it has changed so much and that's the the scary part where the answer suddenly is important because customers are searching for answers and not results that is the change that we're seeing now they are going in expect an answer

[00:11:33] oh that's good enough and leave i mean you have done it i've done it we put it in into google hey good restaurants in linds where i'm from and usually i would go for maps and just scroll through the the yeah five star four star ratings now i get a recommendation already summarized with my profile somewhat included in google i'm like yeah the first one sounds good and i'll just click on it and walk

[00:11:59] there suddenly this ai summary removed my needs to go to the maps of google right let's just get the the yeah the one recommendation right there without needing to search for results and that's that's that's really cool actually it really is and i suspect there's light bulb moments going off all around the world as some business leaders are listening to this conversation and words like

[00:12:24] the website is no longer the first entry point and elsewhere i've heard the phrase seo is dead which i think is a little exaggerated because i think it's just evolved but taking that that topic there the seo for people that have invested thousands in seo on to get on the front page of google what should they be doing now to to be more visible on these ai platforms yes i was a little bit nasty with saying

[00:12:49] like websites are going to not be the first the the real thing is the the persona is no longer just a marketer or developer or a human of this and that by now it's also an ei scraper it's also an ei agent it's also an ei bot so the website that you present there or actually the content that you put out there website or not any content you put out there right now is being used to train those ei

[00:13:18] models so your content that you put out there and therefore also your website is still super relevant it's still the gateway to get answered or be included in the answer of those ei llms essentially and the really interesting thing that i can see right now in terms of seo and geo and what people are changing

[00:13:43] we do the same process that we did for google now again we try to establish a baseline there are amazing tools like utterly ei and similar out there where you can like establish a baseline of certain prompts and if you get actually the brand awareness that you you want to have it's like an analytics tool for prompts right and if you get like mentioned in the answers make sense we did the same for like google analytics and search and similar so semrush great example and that that's what we've done all the

[00:14:11] time and then we started to optimize then we try to put things on top and here's the cool thing if you're already optimized for seo and i'm not talking about the oh i need to put in as many keywords as possible seo i'm talking about also the technical seo speed of the website above the fault optimization proper structured content in terms of html and structure behind that proper formats established loading times optimized images alternative text of images and all those like technical aspects

[00:14:41] suddenly your content is worth something it has value and i believe the content that you have and the content that you put out there is actually now being lifted to the same importance of your corporate crm data like actually custom like content and data that you have in the company and that means everything you have now put into seo continue doing that because right now all those optimizations

[00:15:09] you have done for seo most likely also work for geo and i say most likely because the way i see it from a pure technical point of view if your website is faster better structured way better optimized in terms of above default below default meaningful information non-meaningful information and has a proper structure overall first of all it's cheaper for all the llms providers to scrape because it's faster that means it's smaller that saves money for them which is nice for them if it's

[00:15:39] saves money usually you get something for it if it's better structured the llm can way easier be trained on the structured content and the information will be yeah outputted more accurately again or quoted more accurate and if you're able to also add context to your images for accessibility reasons that's why you

[00:16:04] should do it those images suddenly also have a proper meaning for the llms so you actually do a lot of amazing things if you optimize for seo on a technical point of view for geo as well because it goes hand in hand better content faster side it just saves money for the llms and gives better content what not to like if i'm if i would be an llm provider i would scrape that site way more often because it's way cheaper for me

[00:16:29] to do that so many great points there again and i'm curious from all the conversations with people you're having all around the world are there any trends in the the kind of things that businesses are asking for help with it whether it be i don't know seamless integration visual editing collaborative workflows that power both technical and creative teams or is it something else what what are people

[00:16:55] mostly asking for help with at the moment when they come to your door yeah so so right now they have a lot of fear around like the changing landscape of ei and where people are going for answers where people are going for sites because traffic is declining but signups are there and conversion rates actually better and it's like a real interesting mess right now it's for many it's a black box and that's when they come to us because hey we are content management system you need to work with

[00:17:23] companies that most likely have the same problems that i do right so that's when they come to us i'm like yeah actually yes the the cool thing is most of our customers started like two years ago and already worked on solutions so they realize there will be a new source or new not not source but a new channel that they can send or that pulls content so for them the immediate reaction was okay i need to go headless because i need the consistency around different aspects or different channels i need to have it

[00:17:51] the same way on the website and i do have a blog on my internet and everywhere that is potentially crawlable as well then the second thing that our customers realized really early on this oh i need to make sure that i don't redo my own work so i should not duplicate my content and if i do i need to throw out the old content and keep it clean that's what most of our customers want to do and already do why because they realize if they have less meaning less content that is more meaningful

[00:18:19] they drive more revenue for less pages that they need to maintain so a thing that i can tell to all the customers out there right now potentially like users of a cms not even just relevant for storyblock but if you're using a cms right now and most likely you're using two to three cms's based on our latest report there clean them up if you have content in there that you don't know that it's published remove it and i can tell you that 99 of people out there and business out there have content out

[00:18:49] that they are ashamed of content that they don't even know exists content that is factually wrong and doesn't even like match the current brand and doesn't mean you need to delete it but it does mean you need to look at it you need to be aware of it because what has changed drastically now and that's what we are explaining to our potential customers coming to us that the content that you created a

[00:19:14] couple of years ago at google it just got downranked and forgotten about it llms are getting trained on their old outdated content so it actively hurts you and that's how we help them now so we help them with a proper like migration guide we have a step-by-step guide of 10 points on how you do proper migration from the old content world of monolith into like a headless motion in a proper way how you like

[00:19:38] really step-by-step guide you through what you need to do and which steps are more important is it more important to clean content up or to migrate it is it more important to do content modeling first or is it more important to create assets and those questions will is answered in our complete step-by-step guide essentially on migration and that is completely generic for all different tools out there whatever you're using once you have done that migration which sounds fearful in the beginning but at the same time

[00:20:07] it's housekeeping and you need to do it otherwise it hurts you anyway at the same time you suddenly have the possibilities to build new tools build new websites build new apps with high quality content so suddenly you're starting from a way better baseline than you had before and then you can start optimizing then you can do the technical seo aspects then you can optimize for content that you want to actually be found with or answered or quoted by and that's when you then start to

[00:20:35] engineer content rather than to just write content and that's the interesting twist that we can see now that people are beginning to be way more confident in the content once they're using headless content management system and that's the thing that we help them solve and yes we do have an amazing automation tool we have an eI registration tool we have an mcp server that can be used we have all those shenanigans but the most important thing is to get the foundation right and i'm not sure if i'm allowed to swear

[00:21:03] but in soft engineering there's a term called shit in shit out yeah so if you produce a lot of bad garbage content and somebody has done that in the past for sure because that's how we all exist in this world we all have done that i mean i know my blog articles from 2018 and i'm really lucky that my team updated updates those by now but i can tell you that stuff would hurt you if nobody ever retouched it and optimized

[00:21:29] it or deleted it or redirected it and yeah if they don't get the foundation right there's nothing we can help with but the foundation is something if you migrate to storyblock you have an amazing foundation to get started with wow and again that's so many big takeaways now i've i just think it's fascinating what you're doing here and we are at that magical time of year where people are looking towards 2026 thinking what am i going to be doing different and listening to you now i'm just thinking the message

[00:21:59] is clear start that housekeeping on your website at the beginning of the year and start getting ready for this you know but i mean there will be a lot of people that have started to be woken up by this but how are more forward-thinking companies how are they already preparing for the the next wave of content delivery across so many merge emerging platforms what are they doing right are there any stories that you can share of of companies that just seem to get it uh is any you'd have to

[00:22:25] mention any names but any examples there yeah so one company and i'm not mentioning name but i know if if they're they're listening to this they know who i mean uh they're using storyblock already now for all the the major sites that they have but also for the knowledge base and here's the cool thing what they have started doing is they have not just used it for like a documentation and internal knowledge base but they have now hooked up that foundation content because we have those apis to an llm and

[00:22:54] to an ai agent and combined it with sendesk so they have combined storyblock with the sendesk instance and what they did is they use the knowledge base as the like source of truth for the agent and now every time a customer support come a ticket comes in that agent immediately goes back to the knowledge base tries to find the proper answer formulates an answer based on the question that was raised and prompts it to the first level support to then say oh yeah i like it oh i don't

[00:23:22] like it and suddenly you have an immediate time saver based on your actual content and it saves you hours every day because the answer is literally in seconds but there's still a human in the loop that controls okay yeah makes sense i would write it the same way and pushes it out and suddenly the content that you usually just had locked up in your documentation or internal knowledge base it suddenly gets used because it's api based because it's headless and because you can hook it up to an

[00:23:48] ai agent and we are now seeing another one that is doing really interesting like um loyalty kind of areas in their sites so think of a large retailer that has a lot of information of things that you purchased from from them and usually the recommendations are not that nice as you might know so if you purchase for example a fridge and i've done that a couple of months ago you will end up

[00:24:15] with a lot of fridges being recommended to you right after you purchased it and i guarantee you i will not buy a fridge in the next couple of years because i just bought one so this is first completely wasted money second wrong recommendation third definitely not personalized but not in a good way and there are options once you have your content sorted in a proper way and structured in a proper way you can use something like a vector database or storyblock strata which is another

[00:24:43] like product that we're launching next year we had already a big announcement around it a couple of weeks ago and what it does it vectorizes your all like the content that you have and by vectorization it helps you also to reuse the same content in a different way what that means is that suddenly you can do a semantic search on your content so if i know my history of purchases of i bought a fridge i bought this i bought this i bought this i bought this suddenly i could do hey this customer has purchased

[00:25:13] those things give me something that is relevant for those data points and then something like a vector database or storyblock strata can return you results of things that are similar or semantically relevant for exactly that profile and then you can display it and suddenly the recommendation is no longer fridge but maybe it's a different tray for that fridge or maybe it's a fridge sorting kind of thing or maybe it's something completely different because if you're remodeling your fridge maybe after

[00:25:42] two weeks you hit your your sink maybe you want to redo your sink and suddenly it gets way more personal and maybe it's it's just magnets on the fridge itself it's like there's so much potential and now i'm used to retail but now imagine the same thing for uh let's say uh a football club you have your most favorite um like player maybe you have your most favorite kind of location where they play and there's a lot of content on those sites but maybe there's like recommendations of what

[00:26:12] you need to know like content pieces that you should know that you get access to in a signed in version of like their start site that is customized perfectly onto your semantically relevant content and we've seen that now already happening people are doing that right now they have the content story block have the ai agent or the ai probability and semantic search built in and then literally just consume the content and display it for the users in those signed areas and that's personalization

[00:26:38] at scale you know like that's individualized for this one human and suddenly it actually is really nice and it's not just a hey first name brackets open closed however it's it's an actual like relevant piece of content for them and i mean there are so many opportunities and i just mentioned two use cases but the reality is you can hook it up to anything and you can have a complete like chatbot experience and replace literally anything it's really cool yeah incredibly cool and when i was doing a little

[00:27:08] research on you before you came on the podcast i was also reading about another concept that you're incredibly passionate about is joyful content now we've all done enough doom scrolling in our time to to know what not to look out for but joyful content walk me through that yeah so we we're always thinking about how a content management system can be fun can make sense to marketers and developers alike and

[00:27:37] we realized that even though like with storybook you have more flexibility you're more efficient because of the workflows you're more stable it it gets things done faster because of how we build it because we built the ui for marketers and we built the api and the whole technical part for developers i myself i'm a software engineer that turns ceo which is a weird combination but at the same time it's actually really helpful because i understand both sides by now and i realized that actually what i want for people to

[00:28:06] like arrive to in storyblock is something that we call joyful headless and the result of joyful headless is joyful content so the idea is that if you create if creating content and managing content is actually fun and not like putting content into a graveyard because that's the reality of most content management system is the past if that is actually way more fun where you can hook it up with different third-party tools you're composable you can literally combine it with your most favorite

[00:28:34] tools and also the tool itself is well designed is properly handled thinks about how the usability actually itself is does proper testing adds features that are demanded by customers sounds like logical things but turns out it's not not that logical those are things that people get excited about and i want all our marketers and the marketers all our customers to start on a monday morning not with oh god it's it's

[00:28:58] it's work again if they open storyblocks like i know exactly where i left off on friday and i get this done today with a smile on their face like that that's the whole idea and i believe if we can't get this this human aspect of joy back into what we do on a daily basis they will create way better content because at the end you don't want to read something from somebody that actually hates what the person is doing you want to read content and you want to consume content be doom scrolling or be it on a proper

[00:29:28] article or even a podcast people actually enjoy what they're doing and i want to help at least a little bit to bring that back because alex and my co-founder and i we've been in so many cmss in our like life by now because we worked at agencies before we helped some of the largest brands out there we built the b2b b2c stores and all of that and it was never a pleasant experience

[00:29:54] not even one and this has changed with storyblock now like all customers love us we have basically no churn uh you can literally ask any customers at storyblock if they like it it's usually a big yes so the website is storyblock.com block spelt b-l-o-k i will put a uh link on the show notes for everybody to check out and for anybody listening at the moment they're going to type in storyblock.com

[00:30:21] they're at the site what can they expect walk them through what they should be doing as soon as they arrive to get the feel and and what it can do for them what would you advise yeah i recommend try it out it's free to try out so click the button on try it for free then you can choose your your joy right then you can choose basically your onboarding scenario either for marketer or for developer and then you will navigate it through a demo as well so just try it if you like it if you

[00:30:46] have a problem with content right now it's your choice to fix it now or just wait another month i would recommend to do it now because to be honest in a month your competitor most likely has done it already so it's easy to get started try it out it's really nice oh wow well you've certainly got a new person here i'm going to be checking that out i can promise you that and i would also invite everyone listening to check it out and and also let me know what do you think what did you like

[00:31:15] what have you took away from today's conversation i think there's so many big talking points there but dominic more than anything thank you for shining a light on this such an important conversation and hopefully we'll be sending a few people your way but thank you for starting today thank you so much for having me i think there's something quite refreshing about dominic's take on content today because he made it clear that the shift is not about fear it's about getting your house in order

[00:31:42] a little spring clean if you will so you can compete in a world where ai is your customers first point of contact not your website and the message that stayed with me most is how outdated content can actually become a liability a single old page can ripple through every ai summary that mentions your brand and that alone should change your priority list for 2026

[00:32:06] and also thank him for exploring how forward-thinking companies are already using headless platforms to clean up their legacy content support ai agents and deliver more relevant recommendations and these examples around customer support automation and personalized retail experiences i think collectively show what becomes possible when your content is structured better but i'd love to

[00:32:32] hear what today's episode sparked for you did dominic's point about websites becoming data sources surprise you does geo make sense as you take the next step for seo and what are you planning to tackle first in your own content stack in 2026 please share your thoughts with me what stood out and what you would like us to explore next as always techtalksnetwork.com you'll find over three and a half thousand

[00:33:00] interviews there send me a message i'd love to hear from you but that's it for today so thank you as always and i'll speak with you all again very soon you