By Richard Harroch
Is your website traffic and performance suffering? A modern website content management system (CMS) can enhance your brand, performance, and traffic from both search engines and AI chatbots alike.
Among the many options out there, RebelMouse stands out—not just as a CMS, but as a full creative and technical partner for publishers and brands seeking a modern edge. From performance-driven design to AI-powered editorial tools, RebelMouse is helping companies thrive in the age of AI where the web ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex.
We sat down with Andrea Breanna, founder and CEO of RebelMouse (and former CTO of the Huffington Post), to talk about the platform’s origin, its unique approach to innovation, and what’s next in AI and web evolution.
Q: From a high level, what is RebelMouse—and what inspired you to start it? How has the company evolved since launch?
I was running the product and engineering teams for all of the media properties at AOL after we sold Huffington Post. I inherited 12 different CMS platforms and was simultaneously being recruited as CTO of several other large media and tech companies. AOL had acquired Huffington Post in part because we had developed a better approach to the CMS. The key differentiators were editorial tools that would teach editors content distribution and a technology team with an approach that allowed us to always integrate the emerging technologies of the open web quickly.
The problem was very clear—the current CMS platforms left a huge gap for high-value websites that were now competing with consumer expectations to have products as fast and smart as the tech giants. WordPress, Drupal, and custom, homegrown platforms all left companies with a desperately long roadmap buried in technical management. We were spending $5 million a year developing the tech at Huffington Post, so the mission of RebelMouse was to create website technology that would always stay modern at a reasonable starting price.
Over our years, I am very proud that we were the technical launch partner and platform for internet giants like The Dodo and Axios. The platform hosts high-value sites that collectively reached nearly a billion people in 2024, with a fast pace of growth in 2025.
Q: AI is everywhere right now. How are you integrating AI tools into the content-building experience within the RebelMouse CMS?
We are very thoughtful and careful about integrating AI. We don’t believe it replaces humans or creates great content. But it is excellent at optimizing content for SEO, metadata, social media, and AI search—which is about technical SEO at its base. It’s incredible at personalization and customer journeys. It makes a very powerful research tool for editors and marketers to understand and reference their own content.
It’s really about efficiency for editors, and improving the user journey and experience. We don’t want to bog people down with every tool and feature we can imagine. We want to empower editors and creators with the right tools for the right jobs: chatbot research assistants built on your own content archive, using AI to target ads to content for maximum revenue, and personalized content delivery based on user experiences.
And then there’s MCP (Model Context Protocol), which offers next-generation efficiencies for the enterprise.
Q: You’ve been quite vocal about MCP in general—what do you see as its promise for the web and how are you approaching it at RebelMouse?
This is a very recent and significant development in AI. MCP is a breakthrough that allows AI to use any software’s APIs to interact with an application. In simple terms, this means that AI can do much more than chat and output responses, it can actually go out and do things.
We have very quickly integrated MCP into our core technology and will be releasing tools that allow our clients to make design changes by chat. AI chatbots are fairly commonplace today, but this next generation will be able to actually make changes that are requested of them. This means a massive simplification in the workflow of designer to developer to product manager approval, which will now be from product manager to chatbot with instant results.
Working from design templates will also become an automated process. You can create beautiful designs in a platform like Figma, and then have the designs automatically translated to code and a new site.
While we don’t currently recommend using AI for beginning-to-end content creation because of potential hallucinations and penalties from the search engines, MCP can dramatically change the way that updates to content occur. This used to be a process where professional SEOs and editors would describe changes to a developer who would then write a script to run those changes. Now it can simply be done in a chat interface.
Q: Where do you see the AI and web development space going in the next year or two? How is RebelMouse preparing for that future?
AI overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity are fast becoming an option for searchers online. But marketers have not yet fully realized that optimizing their company website is the way to get mentioned in the AI conversations where their brand is relevant. ChatGPT will mention the brands that are winning in SEO because it uses that logic to find its answers.
AI is going to revolutionize the open web entirely, changing what we expect when we go to a website and what companies expect to get from their websites. The costs and ways to develop are going to change drastically.
As SEO traffic declines, it’s a scary time to invest in the web, but it’s also the key to being a part of the future of conversational AI in the consumer space.
Q: There are many CMS platforms out there—WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, etc. What makes RebelMouse fundamentally different?
We are the best-in-class product for performance, technical SEO, and staying modern. We have weekly product updates that are automatically pushed to every client, with no manual version updates ever. Simply put, we enhance a website’s traffic and performance.
WordPress for the enterprise is the CMS that we set out to disrupt. Plugins allowed WordPress to reach the incredibly impressive position they hold today. But the plugins are the problem. For enterprise brands, they introduce a nest of security holes, performance flaws, and conflicting technologies that break each other as they update. You can do a lot with a WordPress platform, but it takes millions of dollars in development each year to keep the product state of the art.
We solve technical SEO, performance, and have the ability to become a part of the enterprise stack, meaning that companies can use only the components they need. We have clients with a small operating budget that punch far above their weight and leapfrog their competitors.
Webflow allows marketers to quickly build pages and connect them into other APIs, but the performance and technical SEO of those pages is deeply lacking and they rarely win in organic SEO or help boost mentions in AI conversations.
Squarespace is a fantastic solution for a very small company that needs the equivalent of a business card. We really don’t compete with them because our clients have websites that are fundamentally important to their business.
We’re a solution for high-value sites that need to be running at the highest level of performance across the board—from UX and supported features, to technical SEO, to security and speed. We also partner deeply with our clients and work together at a strategic level to enhance the technology benefits.
Q: Some businesses aren’t in a position to migrate CMS platforms. Does RebelMouse offer any solutions for improving performance without a full migration?
We’re very proud to be offering an optimization layer to high-value sites that are not in a position to migrate to another CMS. The technology, called RebelBoost, is an optimization layer that works with any CMS. If you are failing at Google’s Core Web Vitals or getting bad scores on technical SEO, we can greatly improve that. It takes a day to set up and has immediate impact.
Q: How can businesses obtain more information about your products and services?
We have white papers, articles, webinars, and more on our website at www.RebelMouse.com.
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Copyright © by Richard Harroch. All Rights Reserved.
Richard D. Harroch is a Senior Advisor to CEOs, management teams, and Boards of Directors. He is an expert on M&A, venture capital, startups, and business contracts. He was the Managing Director and Global Head of M&A at VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital fund in the San Francisco area. His focus is on internet, digital media, AI and technology companies. He was the founder of several Internet companies. His articles have appeared online in Forbes, Fortune, MSN, Yahoo, Fox Business and AllBusiness.com. Richard is the author of several books on startups and entrepreneurship as well as the co-author of Poker for Dummies and a Wall Street Journal-bestselling book on small business. He is the co-author of a 1,500-page book published by Bloomberg on mergers and acquisitions of privately held companies. He was also a corporate and M&A partner at the international law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. He has been involved in over 200 M&A transactions and 250 startup financings. He can be reached through LinkedIn.
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