This year, the Web Content and Experience Management (CMS or WCM) industry officially enters its fourth decade.  Most enterprises have spent the past thirty-odd years beefing up digital teams and deploying ever-more sophisticated Web CMS tools. Many of you have gone through at least one CMS replacement cycle, and sometimes more. So I can understand why you might not want to switch again.

But the world has changed. That means, yes: for many of you it’s time to reconsider your CMS platform.

Rise of WCM 4.0

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: even before the advent of AI, your informational website was becoming relatively less important. The new omnichannel era with its profusion of engagement channels means comparatively less emphasis on website interactions. 

Earlier this year, I wrote a stinging piece on the “Death of DXPs” that discussed how suite vendors had backed themselves into a corner with heavyweight CMS platforms far out of line from what digital leaders really need right now.  The larger context, though, is the rise of what RSG calls “WCM 4.0” to address a changing digital landscape.

The AI Accelerator

If anything, the past several months have seen an acceleration of trends leading to the demise of old ways of employing a Web CMS. The prime accelerant is, of course, AI.

As you read this, AI chat is substantially reducing traffic to your informational websites and some of your applications. This will only get more pronounced. Most enterprises are responding with AEO tactics, making structured content snippets available to crawlers, typically via question-and-answer couplets. This is smart and RSG continues to advise our member firms on good practices.

Ultimately, though, these tactics will run into significant limitations.  First, your Web CMS likely does not have all the content and assets you want to introduce into AI-mediated searches and conversations.

This gets magnified when you transition to feeding LLMs directly. You’ll want to be able to parse a core store of structured marketing content and assets to generate myriad combinations of content sets that richly inter-relate to each other.  

Put another way, LLMs want to consume a comprehensive graph of content. In your Web CMS, you likely have some text, links, and perhaps some images.  This challenge will only get magnified as more interactive services, including ecommerce, transition to chat-based interfaces.

CMS Vendors Back-Footed

All these developments find nearly all major WCM vendors – headless and traditional – caught on their back feet.  Most of them have focused their platform development on inserting Gen AI features into web content workflows. In retrospect this will feel quaint, and likely irrelevant, as architectures shift momentously underneath them.

For large enterprises, Gen AI is more likely to play out as a service, typically applied to your content supply chain, and not so much at your website edge. Critically, Gen AI services will increasingly get invoked in response to AI-fueled decisioning services, with humans in the loop, rather than at the forefront.  See this recording for more details.

The demise of Sitecore's flagship XP offering heralded the coming slide for Web 3.0 vendors.  Optimizely, Adobe, Acquia, Contentful, and other big names are also at risk. The first three of those firms notably all reside toward the top right of Gartner’s 2025 magic quadrant, but you know that game is rigged. The technology supplier market and their analyst shills have been slow to react, but you can be faster.

Alas, the advent of headless CMS vendors, while frequently running on more modern infrastructure with SaaS-based delivery models, has not resolved the fundamental challenge, at least for large enterprises.  Turns out headless is a (useful) feature, but doesn’t address the deeper requirement for customer-facing content needing to move lower in your stack, decoupled from the web channel.

Put another way, for the serious enterprise, your Web CMS needs to be “legless” much more so than headless.  (Your outbound marketing platform and social engagement hub and CRM also need to be legless, but that’s better explained in this podcast episode.)  A legless approach to structured, enterprise content and assets – as well as data and personalization logic – is what distinguishes a WCM 4.0 platform from a 3.0 platform.

An Opportunity for You

Sorry if all this comes off like a warning, because for you the enterprise MarTech and Digital leader, it’s really an opportunity.  Downsizing at the website edge allows you to concentrate more on what matters elsewhere in your stack. 

Websites aren’t going away; they’re just changing, and this offers a window for you to change yours for the better. Replacing a heavyweight CMS with a lighter inbound experience platform can enable a more integrated experience for humans and crawlers, along with a more natural blend of content and services on the same screen. In short, WCM 4.0 can make your digital operation faster, lighter, cheaper, and more effective.  

This implies that underneath your engagement layer resides a structured graph of diverse content and asset components.  For a long time technology on offer wasn’t mature enough to support that. It’s now beginning to get there.  

RSG calls these these solutions Omnichannel Content Platforms or “OCPs.”  They serve as a kind of "content warehouse" analog to your "data warehouse." People smarter than me can clue you in on all the benefits and inevitable pitfalls. Suffice it to say that at this tier, you manage much more than web content. 

Change Is Hard

Twenty-five years ago I founded “CMS Watch,” the predecessor brand to Real Story Group, so on a personal note, I’m a bit saddened by a descending Web CMS market.  Yet we should all be enthusiastic about the prospects of an ascending customer experience.

Indeed I’m very excited on your behalf about the next phase of enterprise customer content management.  It won’t be simple, but Real Story Group is helping enterprises like yours make the transition.  If you’d like to get in on this guidance, reach out to me or any RSG colleague directly.