When was the last time you posted news on your website? Is the FAQ still up to date? What about your product pages? Do they tell the whole story?
If the answer to one or more of those questions is no, your website probably needs a serious update. You likely already know that.
The bigger problem is usually not the website itself or the technology choice behind it. It is the process behind updating it.
Why websites derail
You might be using a content management system like WordPress, Drupal, or one of the many online site builders. The process with those tools is still people-driven. Someone has to know where things live, how pages are structured, which shared elements need updating, and how to publish without breaking anything.
Those systems also tend to get more brittle over time. WordPress is the familiar example. There is a plugin for everything, until there are too many plugins, too many exceptions, and too many hidden dependencies between them.
Team changes make that worse. People leave. New people join. Context disappears. The website still works, but fewer people understand how it works or what should happen when something needs to change.
What we’ve seen over and over again with our clients is that they create a new website with the best of intentions and then things drift over time. People leave and new people join. Technical debt builds up in the form of technical or content work that needs attention but isn’t getting any. As this work accumulates, the task just gets larger and larger. Once these tasks escalate into months long projects, the chance that they will ever happen drops further and further.
AI to the Rescue?
AI has changed what is possible in web development. Website work was one of the earliest practical uses for AI-generated code, and agentic coding tools are already proving they can handle real website tasks. They can update content, adjust templates, clean up metadata, and implement repetitive changes quickly.
What is still missing in many small companies is operational adoption by non-technical website owners. Most teams still think in ChatGPT terms: ask for some text, copy it somewhere, and hope for the best.
What they need is different. They need a workflow where they can request a website change and have AI work on the website itself, not just describe the change in a chat window. That means AI needs access to the site, the tools around it, and the checks that keep the output reviewable. Agentic AIs address this problem.
Making your website agentic
Many reasons exist for websites to get in the broken state that we outline. With Agentic AIs, getting out of that mess is something that no longer has to be a lot of manual work.
A key point with Agentic AIs vs. the AI tools you might use already (like ChatGPT) is that Agentic AIs help you automate processes. Automating the process of doing updates to your website is something that is fairly straightforward from a technical point of view. Likewise migrating content from one technical solution to another is something that is very doable now.
What exactly is an Agentic AI?
Before we get into how FORMATION can help, it helps to define what sets Agentic AIs apart from just using ChatGPT.
It can work on the real website
ChatGPT essentially just gives you text. An agentic workflow can use tools. It can use these to work on the actual website. This includes opening and reading relevant files, creating new ones, updating copy, formatting it correctly, fixing the metadata, adjusting links, and preparing the result for review. All the things you normally do manually by clicking buttons in your CMS are things that an agentic AI can automate.
Agents follow strict processes via skills
When you use ChatGPT, every conversation starts from zero. It’s Groundhog Day ! Who are you? Who am I? What are we doing? Why am I here? That’s not what you want when you are trying to do real work. For that, you need processes, guardrails, and known ways of getting things done to be implicit.
When you work on a website you want to jump straight into the action. To make this possible, you need to define the process. Explain it what right looks like to you. What tools you prefer. What check lists to follow. Your editorial process, approvals, as well as the technical process. Agentic AIs solve this by codifying process as ‘skills’. Some skills you can download will “teach” the AI how to use specific tools. Other skills that you author codify your specific process. They define what you need to happen, and how and when.
remove the Groundhog Day effect and turn what is otherwise an unpredictable process into a highly predictable and testable one. Imagine the most diligent process-focused person you’ve ever met sticking to the process no matter what. Exactly as you want it. Computers are good at repeating things once they’ve been told what to do. That’s what you want here.
A good set of guard rails can cover everything from:
- your editorial process
- language and tone preferences
- your site structure
- how to use tools to publish changes
- automated checks and balances
These collective skills become your guard rails. They ensure that the Agent knows what success looks like and that it avoids common failure modes. You can start simple and build these out over time. If you see your agents struggle or go off the rails, more guard rails are the way to get it back on track again. And the good news is that you don’t need to spell it out. A conversation that went off the rails where you had to step in to fix it can become the input to having the AI write down the learnings as a new skill. Skill authoring together with the AI is a process where your guard rails get better over time. As you gain confidence in the system, you’ll be tackling bigger and bigger edits.
Doing more complex changes requires planning
A real website update usually touches more than one thing. Changing a service page may also require updates to headings, internal links, shared sections, SEO fields, and related landing pages. Agentic workflows defined in skills can handle that full sequence instead of leaving someone to patch the rest by hand. But even if you don’t have the skills fully specified, Agentic tools can learn by example as well.
Most Agentic tools use AI models that are capable of reasoning. They go through a little process of gathering information, reading skill files, and making a plan. This is how more complex plans get constructed from the skills and guidelines you’ve provided. It also is able to reason about your existing site. It will inspect it, realize what frameworks and tools you are using and be biased to using that. Without needing to be prompted. Any documentation that is there for developers or your internal people is something that an AI can use as well. It all feeds into the plan.
Going from reactive to proactive: recurring processes
Some website work should happen regularly. FAQs go stale. News sections get neglected. Metadata drifts. Internal links break. Agentic workflows can help keep that maintenance moving with recurring tasks and review steps instead of letting it sit in a backlog. You can simply ask to have certain processes kick off on a schedule. High-level automations like “Every Wednesday morning, prepare a draft article based on a list of ideas, and notify me for the next step in the editorial process”
These high-level, scheduled prompts are where agentic website management comes to life because now you are approving rather than directing, refining rather than authoring, and correcting instead of directing.
How we help you get started
Many readers are more than capable of figuring this out themselves. If only they had the time. Time is the limiting factor in most small companies, and website process work tends to stay below the line until the backlog becomes too painful to handle. Instead of going through the slow and costly process of piecing together what you need over weeks or months, why not get it done in a few days?
What we offer is a fast route to a working agentic website setup. We can clean up your current website, put sensible guard rails in place, and make ongoing updates practical instead of experimental.
The scope can stay small or go much further. If you want a full website overhaul, we can do that. If the current design is fine, we leave it alone. If the editing process is already simple in some areas, we do not add complexity for its own sake.
The point is to start covering the boxes that are currently being missed and turn them into repeatable work handled by your Agentic Webmaster. We can start small and leave the rest to your team, or keep going once the website workflow is working.
Reach out for a free consulting call. Tell us what you want to achieve on your website and we’ll get you started.