Internet entrepreneur from the Netherlands. I'm the founder of Yoast, the company behind the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. Now I invest in and build digital companies through Emilia Capital, and I'm working on Progress Planner. Read more →
A WordPress plugin that helps site owners build consistent content habits and track their website progress.
InvestmentInvesting in and building digital companies, with a focus on open source, sustainability, and female entrepreneurship.
CodeBuilding SEO tools for Astro and EmDash, contributing to EmDash core, and sharing code on GitHub.
In 2008 I wrote "WordPress SEO: the definitive guide." Eighteen years later, this is the Astro version. The full SEO stack: linked JSON-LD graphs, per-collection sitemaps, auto-generated OG images, IndexNow, schema endpoints for agent discovery, and why keyphrase optimization matters less than you think.
The SEO Framework analyzed 180,000 AI bot requests and found zero llms.txt lookups. Their conclusion: not worth implementing. That conclusion reveals a misunderstanding of how web standards work, and a willingness to only pick sides after the debate is settled.
I've been arguing that the next open web needs machine-readable architecture. So I built a piece: seo-graph, a schema.org JSON-LD graph engine that now powers four sites and a CMS plugin. Built in a single session with Claude Code.
Anil Dash calls it the endgame for the open web, and he's right. But the structural collapse has already started. The indie web is mostly gone, the winners have already left, and defense alone won't fix it. The question isn't how to protect what remains. It's what to build next.
WordPress's deepest problems aren't cosmetic, they're architectural. The responses to EmDash from Matt Mullenweg, Hendrik Luehrsen, and Brian Coords crystallize what needs to change: the data model, content storage, and plugin permissions.
Cloudflare just launched EmDash, a CMS designed for how we actually build in 2026: AI agents, structured content, edge deployment. Here's why it matters.
I built an AI-powered Q&A feature that lets you ask questions about anything I've written. Here's how it works, and why I built it on Cloudflare Workers AI.