I’m not feeling lucky anymore

Are you old enough* to remember Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

Originally, you had two choices with Google search. You could get a page with 10 links or if you were feeling lucky, you would just be taken to the top result. But there is no single top search result for a query anymore. Google serves you different results depending on where you are, who you are, what browser you’re using, what time of day it is.

There is no one answer.

AI answers are following that same pattern. According to a massive research study WordPress VIP just did about AI usage, most people still click through to the source after an AI answer, because the trust isn’t there yet.

But those clicks are just a phase.

The trust gap is closing faster than anything before it. It took Google more than twenty years to earn “I’m Feeling Lucky,” to get to the point where we just trust it to answer our questions for us and no one clicks any links. Publishers call this Google Zero, where Google no longer sends them any traffic.

When your search and AI traffic goes to zero, will your business survive? Do you have a direct connection to your audience? To your customers?

* The button still exists if you visit google.com on a laptop, but you’ll never see it when you search on a mobile browser or when you search from a URL bar. In fact, the button now cycles between feeling “lucky” and “hungry” and “playful” and “adventurous.” It’s a relic.

2,000 people surveyed say nobody does AI messaging well

Every marketing team I talk to is both terrified and excited by AI. Honestly, both reactions are justified.

I get it. There’s no template to work from. This is an unprecedented disruption.

WordPress VIP asked 2000 people to tell us who they think is doing AI well in their brand messaging.

The resounding answer was: nobody!

No one is making AI make sense to regular people. No one can tell them why it matters, why it’s good for them.

So what can a marketer do when there’s no incumbent, no playbooks, no guarantees?

Well, that’s the opportunity. No template to copy means no one is ahead of you. The first brand that says something true about AI plainly, in language their customers will actually repeat, wins the hearts and minds of the next big market.

If someone asked you what brand is doing AI messaging well, who would you name?

Portability is survival

Every team I talk to has the same instinct for their content: go where the audience is. Chase them on search. Chase them on social. Now they’re chasing them on AI answer engines.

Whether you think that’s lazy or not, it can be valuable in the short term. But long term, it’s a trap.

Your only goal is to get a strong, direct relationship with your audience and your customers.

It’s the same with the software you choose for your site. If you build on a closed system, you’re stuck. You’re dependent.

One of my favorite publishers has consolidated two dozen sites onto WordPress VIP in our global private cloud. Every new site they acquire gets migrated in. Because they know that they are in control of their future. They own the stack. Everything they do is portable. If we don’t give them what they need, they can move to other WordPress hosts or even self host.

My indie web friends have been saying this for decades. But it’s not about nostalgia or freedom or being part of a movement. It’s about survival.

Secure MCP?

At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your WordPress?!?

You bet. It’s here now.

People joke that the “S” in MCP is for security. So WordPress VIP made Secure MCP for the biggest and most important websites on the planet. Auditable. Governed. Available inside all the apps you’re using to manage your sites today — Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex — and even apps that don’t start with a C.

My favorite feature is Step-up Authentication, where sensitive operations require you to authenticate again.

Papal get ready

The Pope posted on X about the hundredth anniversary of the Holy See’s publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. It was a “moment to reflect on the importance of books and of writing,” but the internet took it as a command to write dirty fanfic or to stop using AI for writing, treating it as a guilt trip for people with writer’s block.

For three years now, my most recent post was about horseback riding in Brooklyn in high school. Many of the BDRs who reached out to sell me something talked to me about horseback riding. It was creepy and annoying.

I’ll never catch Darren Murph, but I’m looking forward to writing more.

Content Guidelines for people and agents in CMSes

The biggest risk to your company right now isn’t AI. It’s how you coordinate your AI with your people.

You can’t just promise to keep a “human in the loop.” Writing a policy document isn’t enough. This needs to be part of your content factory, part of the machine that runs your business.

If you can ignore it, it isn’t a policy. It’s a suggestion. It’s a wish.

The teams I’ve seen struggle are the ones who put governance rules in a Google Doc that’s never opened again after it’s written.

The good news is that enterprise procurement teams are aware of this. They want a guarantee that policies will be enforceable.

Even on a micro level like for authoring, I thought WordPress VIP was going to have to build the missing guidelines for our big customers. We did a hackathon project at a team meetup in Berlin a few months ago where we worked on a guidelines plugin. But that same week, Content Guidelines was introduced as an experiment in WordPress core — not just for the biggest websites, but for all WordPress sites. It’s a way to define editorial guidelines in code so your content “stays on-brand and consistent” whether it’s worked on by people or agents.

How do you make sure your people and agents follow the same rules?

Let me know on LinkedIn.

Two things I learned from Om Malik

Breakfast with Om in SF in 2012

Om Malik died last week.

He liked me — or maybe he tolerated me, but he loved several of my good friends. So my heart goes out to each of them as so many people in our industry celebrate his life and share how amazing and influential Om was in their lives.

The first thing I learned from Om was: document your meetings with photos. He would just suddenly take a picture of me during a coffee or lunch meeting, usually with a ridiculously fancy camera. So I would take one of him with my phone. Like a counterattack. But it really helped me develop a habit to do the same when I’d get a chance to spend time with someone I hadn’t seen in years — and might not see again for years.

The second thing I learned was: never put your own name in your company. He created a company with the clever name GigaOm, but years later when he was no longer involved and they sold it, it was weird. Like what would he call his next company? Do people think he’s still part of his old company? I think about that as I work at Matt’s company Automattic or when I see Craig from Craigslist at the airport. Om and I talked about this once when we both found ourselves no longer in charge of the companies we founded. While it stung, I pointed out that at least mine didn’t have my name on it and that part must be rough. He thanked me for noticing that and added:

“Life and business are hard, startups are harder. But I enjoyed every minute of it. I see this as an opportunity for rebirth. The hurt will some day stop hurting and until then, I will look at our great team and what amazing things they will do.”

Gracious person. Incredible writer.

Matt was the first person I thought of when I saw the news. Matt wrote All Roads Lead to Om and people shared that even from the hospital, Om was still reporting WordPress bugs to Matt.

Stacey Higginbotham worked with Om at GigaOm, her X handle is gigastacey. Om’s death hit her hard. Hunter Walk reminds us to celebrate people like Om Malik and Susan Wojcicki while they’re still alive. Nate Williams said “I don’t think I’ve seen SF Tech shake like this since Blake Krikorian passed away.” There was so much more from Rafat Ali, Marc Benioff, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Tony Conrad, John Gruber, Ashley Mayer, Jim Lanzone and The New York Times. And here is Christopher Michel’s photo collection of Om the Great.

Om had a heart attack nearly 20 years ago and it made a lot of people in the blogosphere who were chasing breaking news around the clock take a step back and think about the sacrifices they were making to their health. I got to see Om in one-on-one meetings and frequently at industry events or holiday gatherings at our friends’ houses and I never forgot to tell him how glad I was that he was still here with us.

Comin’ out of my cage and I’ve been doin’ just fine

My wife is Greek and she visited Greece a lot when she was younger, but hadn’t been there since we met 30 years ago. So we planned an epic two-week family vacation this summer to see seven cities in Greece.

It was incredible and I had a wonderful time — until I got sick with norovirus.

I felt full all day that last Wednesday, even when I didn’t eat. Then came a night of fevers. I took a shower on Thursday morning to bring my temperature down to 101.1° and went to the medical office. I had a lot of firsts that day:

  • First time passing out.
  • First time a doctor couldn’t find my pulse and got the paddles ready. (I recovered on my own.)
  • First ambulance ride — with lights and sirens!
  • First CT scan.
  • More NSFW firsts.

Thessaloniki was the final city we planned to visit and I saw it from a hospital bed for three days.

Niki took amazing care of me. It really helps that she is a nurse and that Greek was her first language. Once I was cleared to travel again, we had four flights to get home and nearly two weeks later I still feel like I was just hit by a truck.

I’m just glad it was me who got this and not my wife or one of my kids.

On the same day I got sick, one of our close friends back home lost her wonderful 25-year-old daughter with similar symptoms: fevers, intestinal pain and two different ER visits. We were very lucky. Plus my wife’s mother died in similar circumstances years ago — fevers on a cruise ship and her heart stopping in the ship’s medical office, so this whole ordeal was that much more frightening for her.

We welcome you to the Interbalkan Medical Center of Thessaloniki!
On the back of the card you will find all the information regarding your stay at the Clinic.

On our tours of smaller Greek islands like Mykonos and Santorini, our guides had complained that it was hard to get good medical assistance there because there were no good hospitals and frequent blackouts, so the best doctors don’t want to live there and work there. It’s a good thing that this happened as we got to Thessaloniki, the second largest city on mainland Greece and the home of the European Interbalkan Medical Center, which is “the largest, state-of-the-art, comprehensive private hospital in Southeastern Europe.”

They were amazing.

Now it’s time for a nap.

Horseback riding in Brooklyn?

When I was 15, I joined my high school’s horseback riding club. My high school was in Brooklyn, New York. I took two buses from Bay Ridge to Prospect Park. We would saddle up our horses, walk them down the cobblestone road on Caton Place, walk them across the big traffic circle and then hop on and gallop through Prospect Park. It was madness: 100-pound teenagers on 1000-pound death monsters speeding towards joggers and people with strollers. When we were done we would wash them down, put the saddles away and ride home. No one would sit next to us on the bus. Our boots and jeans were filthy.

I loved it.

Last night after working with our exec team in NYC, I visited the stables. They’re still there! I met the owner and he told me how much the place had changed. They fixed the broken skylights that were just covered with tarps to keep the rain out all these years. They fixed the electric. When I was there in the ’80s, they had a long chain of extension cords that led back to one outlet. They raised the ceilings. They cleaned up the ring. They changed from straight stalls where horses can’t turn abound to box stalls. And they changed the name from Kensington Stables to Prospect Park Stable. It was amazing to see it all and talk to JQ, the current owner, and his daughter who has been riding there since she was a kid.

How to Articulate a Whale

Here’s a fascinating story about Peter Wayne Moe and a team of more than a hundred people preparing the Longbranch Whale to hang at Seattle Pacific University.

I ask Sandilands where he learned to shoot a crossbow. Was he in the army? Was he a sniper? “Of course not,” he says. “I’m Canadian.”

That was one of the coolest things I read in 2022.