Get Started
Your Customers Are Asking AI What to Buy, Not Google. Are You Showing Up?
More than 50% of searches now end without a click. AI systems are answering your customers’ questions before they ever reach your site, and your Google ranking doesn’t guarantee you exist in the places where decisions are actually being made.
These four sessions from DE{CODE} 2026 give you the playbook. You’ll hear from WP Engine’s CMO, a global media CDO, eCommerce specialists, and GEO practitioners on how to structure content for AI, measure what matters when attribution breaks down, and rebuild your site strategy for the era of the Intelligent Web.
Pick the session most relevant to you or watch all four.
The Marketer’s Playbook for the Intelligent Web
Runtime: 30:24
Zero-click search isn’t new, but it’s accelerating, and it’s showing up in real marketing data right now. WP Engine CMO Darcy Kurtz and Ellipsis Head of SEO James Baldacchino share what they’re seeing in their own analytics, what an AI-ready website requires, and how to frame the ROI of AI search investments when traditional attribution is breaking down.
No slides. No theory. Just a candid conversation about what’s working and how to bring your leadership along for the ride.
Who This Is For:
- Marketers building AI search strategy
- Teams struggling with attribution
- Anyone who needs to justify AI investment to leadership
What You’ll Learn in this Session:
- What WP Engine’s own data shows about AI-driven traffic. Spoiler: those visitors convert faster.
- The 3-part AI-ready website framework any marketer can use without becoming a developer.
- How to tell if it’s time to rearchitect your site and what that actually means.
- A new metric mosaic for talking to your CFO when linear attribution is no longer the answer.
Unlocking eCommerce Growth: Content as the AI Conversion Engine
Runtime: 30:41
In the time it takes to run an intro, AI agents have already initiated $2.5 million in global commerce transactions. The era of Zero-Click Commerce is here, and it’s not waiting for brands to get ready.
Two eCommerce specialists join WP Engine VP of Product, Keith Fafel, to explain why your content is now your technical infrastructure, why open platforms like WordPress® have a structural advantage over closed ones in the agentic era, and what every merchant should do differently starting now.1
Who This Is For:
- eCommerce merchants and teams
- Marketers managing commerce stores
- Anyone asking “does our website still matter if buyers never visit it?”
What you’ll learn in this session:
- Why up to 40% of organic visits are disappearing, and why that might be okay.
- What “content as infrastructure” means for your product pages and why schema markup is now non-negotiable.
- Why open platforms have a structural advantage in the agentic era and how closed platforms may be limiting your visibility.
- What moves a buyer from “interested” to “confident enough to purchase” in 2026.
The Chief Digital Officer Perspective: How ITP is Positioning For Growth in an AI-First Future
Runtime: 24:51
ITP Media Group manages over 40 brands, including Arabian Business, Harper’s Bazaar, and Complex, reaching millions of monthly readers. When AI started summarizing their premium content without attribution, they didn’t panic. They rebuilt.
Charlotte Cijffers, ITP’s Chief Digital Officer, shares the decisions behind that rebuild: how ITP restructured workflows to earn AI citations instead of just being absorbed by LLMs, the role WP Engine Newsroom played in scaling output without sacrificing metadata quality, and why the most important thing any content team can do right now is double down on original authority, not chase GEO shortcuts.
Who This Is For:
- Content-heavy brands and media teams
- Marketing leaders managing large content operations
- Anyone whose editorial or content workflow hasn’t been updated for AI discoverability
What You’ll Learn in this Session:
- The difference between being passively absorbed by an LLM and actively earning a citation is a strategic distinction, not a technical one.
- ITP changed three things to earn citations: authority, structure, and regional specificity.
- A 40% Core Web Vitals improvement delivered results downstream across Google Discover, traffic, and user stickiness.
- AI adoption is a cultural and financial challenge first; see what happened when ITP’s CDO decided to do something about it.
Practical Guide: Rebuilding Your Site in the AI World
Runtime: 34:46
You can rank #1 on Google and still be completely invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI mode. This session shows you why and what to do about it.
Rebecca Berin moderates a practical discussion between WP Engine’s VP of Marketing Operations, a publishing technology co-founder, and a GEO agency director. Together, they walk through a Citation Gap Analysis framework, the minimum viable tech stack for AI discoverability, and the organizational alignment question that’s blocking most teams from making progress.
Who This Is For:
- Marketers who suspect they have an AI visibility problem
- Teams about to do a website audit or rebuild
- Anyone who’s ranked #1 on Google but can’t find themselves in ChatGPT
What You’ll Learn in this Session:
- Why ranking in Google doesn’t translate to showing up in AI, including a real brand example.
- What’s suppressing your AI citations (hint: it’s usually a distribution problem, not a content or tech problem).
- WP Engine’s internal framework for minimum viable AI-ready infrastructure, including how they built an LLM into their own editorial workflow.
- The single first step every team should take today: Ask the AI what it knows about you.
The Intelligent Web Isn’t Coming. It’s Already Here.
These sessions give you the frameworks. WP Engine gives you the platform to execute them. Whether you’re building a GEO strategy, restructuring your content architecture, or making the case to leadership for AI search investment, we’re built for what comes next.
