THE YEAR OF THE AI AGENT From Tool to Coworker The old model of AI mainly used ChatGPT for things like generating content ideas, creating and rewriting page titles, and creating and rewriting content. It worked for some SEOs, but most people eventually gave up on it. Today’s model is totally new. AI isn’t just for content. It can help with all aspects of your business. That is, of course, taking into consideration that Google isn’t what it used to be. A year ago, I would have told you AI was interesting but not essential. Then Claude Code and OpenAI Codex got good at programming, and the ground moved. What used to take me weeks or months now takes under 30 minutes. Not a rough draft. A real, working, designed page. I used to build custom-designed and programmed websites with WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go back. The combination of AI-built static sites, agents that can manage pages, and modern hosting has made the WordPress overhead feel like dead weight. What’s coming soon, and I suspect a few teams are already building it, are agents that can create, update, and delete pages on your behalf. Maybe WordPress survives if it becomes more of a CMS where agents have an easier time controlling. I’m a self-taught designer. I built affiliate sites in Photoshop, then moved to Sketch, and finally to Figma. Each jump felt like a leap. Then Lovable.dev showed up, and prototyping changed. Then Stitch from Google. Then Claude Design, which I don’t think anything will beat for a while. If you haven’t tried any of these tools yet, that’s the first homework after you finish this article. What AI Is Actually Good At BUILDING FASTER THAN EVER • Websites, landing pages, tools • Internal tools (SEO analyzers, scrapers, dashboards) • Custom CMS/data pipelines SEO & CONTENT SYSTEMS (NOT JUST ARTICLES) • Programmatic SEO • Structuring content clusters • Data enrichment ANALYTICS & DATA WORK • Cleaning, structuring, and interpreting data • Building custom reporting instead of relying on platforms • Especially relevant for tracking revenue leaks/performance gaps Speaking of SEO, AI is an absolute machine. The people with the best skills and marketing minds will benefit the most. You can ask LLMs to help you with strategies for your affiliate business, you can build agents that score and potentially can improve your site, and you can build the coolest SEO tools to monitor it all. AI Agents: Your Tireless Junior Employee If 2025 was the year of vibe coding, 2026 is the year of agents. The space is moving fast, and the names are getting weirder by the month, but the underlying idea is simple. An agent is a piece of AI that can take a goal, figure out the steps, and execute them without you babysitting every move. Right now, most people lump everything into “AI agents,” but there are really two distinct modes: 1. Deep thinking/reasoning agents 2. Workflow/execution agents The affiliates who win over the next 18 months won’t be the ones with the biggest sites or the best backlink profiles. They will be the ones who figured out how to operate at 10x speed with the same headcount. GPWAtimes.org 30
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