Mark A Michael, co-founder of DevHub, joins Sunny Ray to explain how his company builds websites for franchise and multi-location brands and why the next real estate battle is being fought inside AI models rather than Google search. Michael argues that most brands still design websites for human eyes and assume large language models will simply figure out the rest, when in reality pop-ups, plugins, duplicate content, and missing structured data cause AI agents to skip sites entirely. He describes DevHub as infrastructure that bakes schema and clean data into every page so search engines and AI agents can read a brand's offerings, locations, and voice. Michael traces DevHub's 18 year history from a gamified blogging platform inspired by FarmVille and AdSense, through a decade of white-labeling to media companies and martech partners, to its 2023 decision to work directly with national brands like Mattress Firm. He also shares how chat based CMS management is starting to replace entire internal website teams.
DevHub's founder explains why he is betting websites now need to be written for AI agents, not humans.
What is DevHub and why should people care?
DevHub is what legit brands use to build their websites instead of WordPress, Squarespace, or Webflow. If you're a brand with a lot of locations, people, service areas, stores, shops, manufacturers, distributors, or dealers and you need a bigger web presence, you use DevHub, period.
You said you're building the standard for what AI reads on behalf of a brand. What does that mean in practice?
Most people today are still redesigning websites the way a human consumer sees them, assuming AI is smart enough to just read through the imagery. But structure, meaning content, pictures, integrations, reviews, is what large language models and agents actually use to determine a brand's voice and offer. Pop-ups, plugins, and duplicate content do not serve the AI model and it will just skip the website.
What's the real gap between a normal, well-built website and one that's actually legible to an AI agent?
If a pop-up comes up on mobile and you can't easily close it, an AI agent will just skip the site. We inherit five, ten, twenty years of SEO hacks and trauma from brands, so we act as the infrastructure, auditing every page for broken links and duplicate content and deciding what gets carried over or redirected. Widgets that depend on a third party, like booking widgets, are risky too.
Does the near me search fight change when the searcher is asking an AI agent instead of typing into Google?
After 18 years I've looked for a silver bullet and there is none. If your site is relevant, like descriptive about being in Chinatown and what you actually serve, it fills in the gaps of what AI already knows about you as a human and what it's trying to figure out about your location. It's still near me search, just phrased more conversationally.
Can you explain your multi-location CMS model to someone who has never managed more than one website?
DevHub powers the corporate site, every local microsite, the location finder, and franchise development pages from one dashboard. The difference from a normal multi-site CMS is data and governance, since every location has its own Google Business profile, reviews, and scheduling that has to be managed locally and approved corporately. We rolled out a tick finder campaign nationally almost instantly, and customers can now update the whole network through a chat interface instead of an editor.
In late 2023 DevHub stopped white labeling behind martech platforms and started working directly with brands. What made you cut that layer?
We had no relationship with the actual brand, so when a martech partner's product failed, the brand blamed them, not us, even though DevHub was powering brands like DirecTV behind the scenes. Acquiring Brickwork Software showed us the real value of going direct. Partners were winning brands but only competing on price, and we were the ones stuck discounting while they treated our platform as the commodity.
You and your co-founder Daniel Rust have been building this tech for about 18 years. What does the platform do today that the earliest version couldn't imagine?
We started around 2009 trying to gamify website building for bloggers, inspired by FarmVille and Google AdSense, but ended up with small businesses instead. We survived a decade by white labeling to legacy media companies and then marketing tech companies, until a partner asked us to build 14,000 financial advisor websites at once, which showed us we should be going after brands directly instead of small businesses.
If AI agents are quietly replacing entire workflows, what's one workflow inside DevHub that no longer needs a human in the loop?
Customers can already use a chat window in Claude or ChatGPT to make updates to their websites, though only a couple of our customers use it today. I think the workflow that gets replaced is the internal website team at a brand, rolling three or four jobs like template building and running promos into one person, maybe called head of presence, and I think that becomes real by next year.
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