What’s New in Progress Sitefinity CMS: SEO, AI Discoverability and Personalization

How should digital teams respond as search, AI-driven discovery and visitor expectations change?

The way people discover information online is changing, and so is the role of the website.

That was the focus of the recent What’s New in Sitefinity: New SEO, AI Discoverability and Personalization webinar, which explored how changing search behavior and rising expectations for faster, more relevant answers are reshaping digital experiences.

Alexander Shumarski, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Progress Sitefinity, set the scene before Julian Steiner, Senior Principal Sales Engineer, demonstrated how new Progress Sitefinity CMS capabilities can help teams strengthen SEO, improve AI discoverability and create more intent-driven experiences.

Here are five highlights from the webinar.

1. Bringing SEO and Brand Guidance into the Content Workflow

Content needs to be optimized for search and aligned with an organization’s brand, editorial and, in some cases, compliance requirements.

Julian demonstrated how the Sitefinity SEO Agent and Brand Voice and Style Agent bring that guidance directly into the content editing experience.

Using the fictional Quantum Digital Bank website, he opened an existing mortgage-related news article in Sitefinity CMS and asked the SEO Agent to assess it.

The agent reviewed the content and surfaced recommendations in context. In one example, it identified a missing call to action and suggested additional copy, alongside an explanation of why the change could improve the content.

The important part of the workflow is that the agent makes a recommendation, it doesn’t simply take over.

Editors can review the original content and proposed change, see the rationale, preview the result and then choose whether to apply or discard the recommendation. The same approach can be used across fields including body copy, summaries and metadata.

Julian then switched to the Brand Voice and Style Agent, initially configured to recommend a formal, professional and reassuring tone for the fictional bank.

To show how configurable it is, he changed the instructions to target a younger audience using Gen Z slang. The refreshed recommendations produced a few laughs but demonstrated an important point: the agent can work from an organization’s own brand guidance rather than imposing a generic AI writing style.

Teams can define guidance around tone, terminology, writing conventions and claims to avoid, helping maintain consistency across content and editors while keeping the human editor in control.

2. Using Structured Data to Make Content Easier to Understand

Traditional SEO remains important, but organizations also need to consider how easily search engines and other machine-driven systems can interpret their content.

Sitefinity CMS can help teams implement structured data using Schema.org-compatible markup, providing standardized, machine-readable context about what a page or piece of content represents.

One of the key capabilities shown was data binding. Instead of hard-coding information into JSON-LD and manually updating it when content changes, teams can bind schema elements to Sitefinity fields. For example, an article’s headline, description, publication date and author can draw directly from corresponding CMS fields, allowing the structured data to update with the content.

Julian tested the implementation using the Schema.org validator and Google’s Rich Results Test to check the resulting structured data and identify issues.

The takeaway wasn’t that structured data provides a shortcut to AI visibility. Rather, it gives search engines and other systems clearer context about content—an increasingly useful part of a broader discoverability strategy.

3. Looking Beyond Traditional SEO to AI Discoverability

Structured data led into one of the webinar’s broader themes: what discoverability means when people increasingly use AI tools to find information and research decisions.

Alex described how the starting point of a customer journey is changing. Historically, a search engine might have been the first meaningful interaction between a prospect and a brand.

Today, that research may begin in an AI assistant or answer engine before someone visits the organization’s website. And those systems can draw on information from multiple sources—not just what a company says about itself on its own website.

That creates a challenge for marketers because there isn’t a single switch they can flip to guarantee visibility in an AI-generated answer.

The webinar’s recommendation was therefore to start with what organizations can control. That means continuing to invest in sound SEO, making important content understandable through structured data, publishing useful content consistently and maintaining clear, consistent descriptions of products, services and expertise.

The SEO and Brand Voice and Style agents demonstrated earlier in the session fit into that broader picture: one can help editors identify optimization opportunities, while the other can help teams apply their chosen language and messaging more consistently.

The objective is to build a stronger content foundation for both established search experiences and emerging AI-driven forms of discovery.

4. Generating Experiences Around What the Visitor Actually Wants

The second half of the webinar shifted from getting content discovered to what happens after someone reaches the website.

Alex framed the issue simply: content is only working if people engage with it.

Traditional personalization can help organizations make experiences more relevant, but it generally requires teams to determine segments, define rules and decide what different audiences should see.

Julian’s next demo posed a different question: What if the visitor could simply tell the website what they wanted?

To demonstrate, he created a new homepage experience for Quantum Digital Bank using Sitefinity dynamically generated experiences.

Instead of beginning with the bank’s conventional homepage, the new experience provided an intent box where a visitor could express what they needed—for example, “Do you offer any car finance?”

Sitefinity CMS then generated a relevant experience around that intent, including a hero, explanatory content and cards directing the visitor toward appropriate products and information.

Crucially, the experience was grounded in approved Sitefinity content. Intent can also come from campaign parameters and customer data, while teams can audit interactions to understand what visitors are asking for and identify potential content gaps.

5. Extending Conversational Experiences Beyond the Homepage

Not everybody enters a website through its homepage. Visitors might arrive directly on a product page, blog, documentation or another piece of content through search, social media or a campaign.

So Alex asked how organizations could bring the same conversational approach to more of the website.

Julian demonstrated the Sitefinity AI Assistant.

The assistant can be added as a floating conversational interface or embedded directly within a page. Visitors can ask questions and receive responses grounded in Sitefinity-managed content, with relevant sources presented alongside the answer.

The webinar also showed a more focused question-and-answer experience for situations where a full chatbot conversation isn’t necessary.

Different moments may call for different experiences: someone conducting broad research might benefit from an ongoing conversation, while someone looking at a specific service may simply need a direct answer.

Sitefinity widgets give teams flexibility over where and how these experiences are incorporated, with the same goal: helping visitors reach relevant, trusted content more quickly.

Three Places to Start

Toward the end of the webinar, Alex brought the different demonstrations back to a practical three-step framework.

1. Strengthen SEO

Assess the current state of SEO across important content and look at where capabilities such as the SEO Agent, Brand Voice and Style Agent and technical SEO improvements can help teams optimize more efficiently.

2. Improve Content Structure

Use schema and structured data where appropriate to give machines clearer information about important pages and content types. Data binding can help make that approach more manageable at scale.

3. Experiment with More Personalized, Intent-Driven Experiences

Start with an important touchpoint rather than attempting to transform the entire website at once. Test how visitors respond, examine what they ask for and use that information to decide where to expand.

The message throughout the webinar was to approach the transition incrementally.

Search behavior, AI-assisted discovery and expectations for digital experiences are changing at the same time. Organizations don’t need to respond to every change at once, but they do need to start understanding what those changes mean for their content and digital experience strategies.

See the new Sitefinity capabilities in action.

The demos are where many of these capabilities become much clearer.

Watch What’s New in Sitefinity: New SEO, AI Discoverability and Personalization on demand to see the complete demonstrations and learn how these capabilities can fit into your digital experience strategy.