Google Trends for WordPress, worldwide, 2004 to today. The shape is familiar: peak in 2014, a decade of decline, a flat floor from 2021. Then 2026, and the line climbs back to levels last seen around 2017.
That was not the script. AI site builders, vibe coding tools, agents that generate a whole site from one prompt. WordPress was supposed to be the first casualty. It still runs around 43 percent of the web, and this year more people are searching for it, not fewer.
Two things I think are going on.
First, AI creates users for old tools faster than it replaces them. Millions of people who never called themselves technical are shipping things now. When they need a real site with hosting and a domain and a contact form, they don't reach for the newest tool. They reach for the one with 20 years of tutorials, because that's what the search results and the chatbots both point them to.
Second, and this is the part that should interest tool builders: LLMs are best at whatever they saw most in training. There is more written about WordPress than about any publishing tool in history. Ask an agent to fix your WordPress site and it performs like a senior. Ask it about a tool launched last year and it guesses. The most documented platform gets the biggest AI boost. Incumbents with deep ecosystems may come out of this wave stronger, not weaker.
If that holds, the moat in the AI era is not features. It is how much text about your tool exists for the next model to read.
Curious where this shows up in your stack. Which old tool got better for you since agents arrived?
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