# AI SEO Implementation: What We Change, What Your Team Owns (/blog/what-ai-seo-work-changes-on-your-site) In AI SEO implementation, we ship the words and the settings that live in your CMS ourselves: page copy, new articles, titles, meta descriptions, internal links, schema, and redirects. Your team keeps anything that changes how the site looks or behaves: new page designs, templates, components, tracking, and code. Where that line falls depends on your CMS. On WordPress and Shopify, almost all of it sits in the content layer we can reach. On a Next.js site, more of it lives in code. This post is the honest version of that split, CMS by CMS. By the end you'll know what you hand over in week one, what lands on your developer's desk, and roughly how much of their time it takes. > **Key Takeaways** > > * We ship content and CMS settings directly into your site: copy, articles, titles, meta, internal links, schema, and redirects, wherever we have access. > * Your team owns new page designs, templates, components, analytics, and dependencies. We brief those, with the copy and a layout spec, and never build them ad hoc. > * Nothing goes live without your sign-off. Changes you approve go live within 10 working days, which is the one condition on our guarantee. > * The split moves by CMS: WordPress and Shopify keep most AI SEO work in the content layer, Webflow splits at the Designer, and Next.js puts more of it in your repo. > * When a fix belongs in your codebase, we write the ticket and the acceptance test, then check it in production once it ships. ## The Question Behind "Do We Have the Developers for This?" Buyers ask who will make the changes because most SEO engagements end in a document. The agency audits, writes recommendations, and hands over a PDF that waits for developer time nobody budgeted. We recorded 16 sales calls with prospective clients between April and August 2026. On 7 of them, someone asked a version of the same thing: do we have the development resources to apply what you hand us? It usually came late in the call, and it usually came from the most technical person in the room. That question decides whether a retainer produces anything. So here's our answer in one line, the one Niels gives on calls: we don't hand you advice, we implement directly into your website. There's a limit to that sentence, and the rest of this post is about where it sits. Picture a Head of Growth at a 40-person SaaS company. Their audit lists 60 fixes. Their one front-end developer is booked on the product roadmap until next quarter. If 55 of those fixes need that developer, the audit is a wish list. If 50 of them can ship without that developer, the quarter starts on Monday. The point of the split below is to know which of those two quarters you're buying before you sign. ## The Dividing Line in AI SEO Implementation The line is simple: **we ship words and settings, your team owns look and behavior.** If a change lives in a field your CMS already gives an editor, we make it. If it needs a designer's eye or a developer's merge, it's yours, and we write the brief. We draw it there for two reasons. It's your site, and your name is on every page of it. And a page a buyer judges you on deserves a designer, not a layout we improvised or let an AI generate. ### What we ship ourselves These are the AI SEO deliverables that go straight into your site, wherever we have access: * New articles, guides, and glossary entries, published into templates you already have * Rewrites of existing pages, with answer-first openings that AI search engines can lift * Titles, meta descriptions and headings * Internal links between your pages * Structured data (schema markup), where your CMS takes it without a code change * Redirects, canonicals, and fixes to crawler access, such as a robots.txt rule blocking an AI crawler Most of what moves [AI citations](https://www.rankzero.io/glossary/ai-citation) is on that list. AI answers quote pages that state a fact plainly near the top, and that's a writing job. Our [guide to how LLMs choose sources](https://www.rankzero.io/guides/how-llms-choose-sources) explains why. ### What your team owns Your team keeps the changes that alter how your site looks or works: * New page designs, landing pages, and new routes * Templates, components, layout, and styling * Analytics, tracking, and tag changes * New plugins, apps, packages, and other dependencies * Anything in your product or app, as opposed to the marketing site When the work calls for one of these, you get the same artifacts our other clients get: a brief, the approved copy, and a layout and design spec your designer can build from. ### What needs your sign-off first Everything. **Nothing publishes without your sign-off**, and for content that's deliberate: you're responsible for what your site says, so you approve it before it goes out. A person on our side reviews every draft before it reaches you. The other side of that deal is speed. Changes you approve go live within 10 working days. It's the one condition attached to our guarantee, so we have every reason to keep it. Want to see how the six stages of an engagement fit around this split? [The RankZero Method](https://www.rankzero.io/method) lays them out, week by week. ## AI SEO Implementation on WordPress On WordPress, we ship almost all of the AI SEO work ourselves, because almost all of it lives in posts, pages, and your SEO plugin's fields. Your team only comes in for theme files and new plugins. We connect through WordPress's REST API with an [application password](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/11/05/application-passwords-integration-guide/), a feature built into WordPress since version 5.6. You create it for our user, you can see it in your dashboard, and you can revoke it in one click. No shared admin password changes hands. What we ship on WordPress: * New posts and pages in your existing templates, as drafts for your approval or published once you've signed off * Rewrites of existing posts and pages * Titles and meta descriptions in your SEO plugin's fields * Internal links, image alt text, categories, and tags * Redirects, through the redirect plugin you already run What stays with your team: theme template edits, custom post types, page-builder layouts for new landing pages, and installing a new plugin. A plugin is code running on your production site, so we'll ask before adding one, even a small one. ## AI SEO Implementation on Webflow On Webflow, the line falls at the Designer. Content and page settings are ours, layout and components are yours. We work through a site role you assign in your workspace, scoped to editing content and page settings. That covers most of the job: * Blog posts and other CMS collection items * Copy edits on existing pages * SEO titles, meta descriptions, and Open Graph fields in page settings * 301 redirects in the site settings * Page-level schema, where you're comfortable with us adding it to a page's custom code What stays with your team: new page layouts, symbols and components, class and style changes, and new collection templates. Those are design work in the Designer, and that's where your designer should own the result. One Webflow habit to agree on in week one: who presses publish. A full site publish pushes every staged change, including a designer's work in progress. Publishing a single CMS item doesn't. We settle that rule at kickoff so nobody ships someone else's half-finished page. ## AI SEO Implementation on Shopify On Shopify, product, collection, blog, and page content is ours. The theme is yours. We work through an app installed on your store with only the [Admin API](https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest) permissions the work needs. You approve those permissions at install, and you can uninstall the app at any time. What we ship on Shopify: * Product and collection descriptions, rewritten so an AI shopping answer can quote them * Blog articles and store pages * SEO titles and meta descriptions on each product, collection, article, and page * URL redirects, for renamed products and retired collections * Image alt text What stays with your team: Liquid theme code, sections and templates, theme-level schema, and new apps. Product schema usually lives in the theme, so on most stores a schema fix becomes a ticket rather than a direct change. Say a store selling outdoor gear has 400 products with two-line manufacturer descriptions. AI shopping answers have nothing specific to quote, so they quote a review site instead. Rewriting those descriptions is the bulk of the work, and none of it touches the theme. The one theme ticket is the Product schema, and it ships once, for every product. Our guide to [product page AI visibility](https://www.rankzero.io/guides/ecommerce-product-page-ai-visibility) covers what those descriptions need. ## AI SEO Implementation on Next.js and Other Git-Based Sites On Next.js, Astro, Gatsby, or any site built from a repo, your content usually sits next to your code, so we work in the repo and your developer reviews what we change. Content files and metadata are ours; components, layouts, and new routes are yours. What we ship, through a pull request or straight to the content folder if you prefer: * Articles and pages as Markdown or MDX, if your site already renders them * Titles, descriptions, and metadata values for existing routes * Internal links in the content * Redirect entries, sitemap and robots.txt changes, where those live in config you've opened to us * JSON-LD values, where a component already renders them What stays with your team: new components, layout and styling changes, new routes, rendering changes, and new packages. One check matters more here than on any other CMS: whether your content and metadata show up in the HTML the server sends. Google can render JavaScript, as its [JavaScript SEO basics](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics) explain, but not every AI crawler does. If a page renders its copy only in the browser, that's a rendering fix, and it's your developer's. Our [guide to AI crawlers](https://www.rankzero.io/guides/ai-crawlers) shows how to check. We hold our own site to the same split. rankzero.io runs on Next.js. We commit the blog, guides, and glossary ourselves, along with small technical fixes like titles, canonicals, and redirects. New pages and design changes go through a brief, the same way they would for you. ## When a Fix Belongs in Your Codebase When a fix needs code, we write the ticket and the acceptance test, then check the fix in production once it ships. Your developer gets a change that's already specified, with nothing left to interpret. A ticket from us carries four things: 1. What's wrong, with the URL and what a crawler sees today 2. The change, in the smallest form that fixes it 3. The acceptance test: what we'll check, and how, to call it done 4. Why it matters, in one line, so your team can rank it against product work Then we check it live. A ticket isn't done when it's merged. It's done when the served page passes the test. Take a marketing lead at a B2B software company whose FAQ answers only render after a click. The words sit in a closed accordion, so a crawler reading the raw HTML finds empty sections. The fix is one component change: render the answers in the HTML and keep the accordion as styling. Their developer gets the ticket on Monday with the test written: "the answer text appears in the served HTML of these 12 URLs." The developer ships it by Wednesday, and we confirm the answers in the served HTML the same week. One ticket, a few hours of developer time, and dozens of answers become readable to every engine. Most codebase tickets are like that one: small, specified, and checked. Our [technical SEO service](https://www.rankzero.io/services/technical-seo) is where the bigger ones get scoped. ## What to Hand Over in Week One You hand over three accesses and one name: GA4, Search Console, your CMS, and the person who approves what goes live. That's what we need to start. Here's what each one is for: * **GA4** is where the result is measured. Our guarantee reads: we commit to a 25% rise in AI-referred sessions in your own GA4 within your first 90 days, measured against the 90 days before kickoff. * **Search Console** shows which pages already sit on page two, which is where the first month's quick wins come from. * **CMS access** is the route each section above describes, scoped to what the work needs. * **One approver** keeps the 10-working-day clock honest. Approval by committee is the most common reason a fix sits in a queue. Your developer's share is the codebase tickets, and nothing else. On WordPress and Shopify that's usually a handful in the first month, then very few. On Next.js it's more, and it front-loads into the first few weeks. If you're still deciding who to hire, the question "who ships each fix, on our CMS?" belongs on your list. Ours is answered by name on our [about page](https://www.rankzero.io/about). Our [guide to choosing an AI SEO company](https://www.rankzero.io/guides/how-to-choose-an-ai-seo-company) has the rest, and [how long AI SEO takes](https://www.rankzero.io/blog/how-long-does-ai-seo-take) covers what to expect by day 90. ## Questions About AI SEO Implementation ### Do I need a developer to work with an AI SEO agency? Not for most of the work. On WordPress, Webflow, and Shopify, the content and settings changes ship without one. You'll want a developer for the occasional codebase ticket, and more often on a Next.js site, where content and code share a repo. ### Will you change our site design? No. We don't change layout, styling, or components, and we don't design new pages. When the work needs a new page, we deliver the brief, the approved copy, and a layout spec, and your team builds it. ### Can you publish without our approval? No. Nothing goes live without your sign-off, because it's your site and you're responsible for what it says. Once you approve a change, it goes live within 10 working days. ### What does an AI SEO agency do on my site? It should change the pages, not only report on them. In our case, that means new articles, rewrites, titles, meta descriptions, internal links, schema, redirects, and crawler access fixes, shipped directly wherever we have access, and tickets for anything that needs code. ### Is giving an agency CMS access safe? It's as safe as the access you grant. Use a separate login or key for the agency, scoped to the work: an application password on WordPress, a limited site role on Webflow, an app with only the permissions it needs on Shopify, or repo access with pull requests reviewed on Next.js. Each one can be revoked in minutes. ### What if our site runs on a custom CMS? The same line applies. We ship whatever an editor can change through your CMS, and everything else becomes a ticket with an acceptance test. The share that needs a developer is higher, so we size it on the first call. ## See Your Own Split Before the First Call Every site splits differently, so the useful next step is to see yours. [Book a call](https://www.rankzero.io/services) and we'll run the audit on your domain before we talk, then walk you through which fixes we'd ship and which would go to your team. Want a first look on your own? The [free AI SEO audit](https://www.rankzero.io/tools/ai-seo-audit) checks any URL in about 30 seconds, no signup, and ranks the fixes. Most of what it flags is the kind of AI SEO implementation we ship ourselves.