Best CMS for SEO: What 59,033 Top-Ranking Domains Tell Us

TL;DR

An analysis of 59,033 top-ranking domains found that WordPress powers 49% of them — a 175% increase from the 18% share it held in 2016. For traditional Google SEO, WordPress remains the most evidence-backed choice: flexible, SEO-friendly by design, and adopted by nearly half of the sites Google consistently ranks at the top. The runner-up surprises are Next.js (2.43%, up from zero in 2016), Drupal (2.43%), and Webflow (1.54%, up 2,548% from 0.06%). The core finding is straightforward: CMS choice matters for technical SEO, but it is not a ranking factor in itself. What matters is whether the CMS gives you control over the elements that do matter — crawlability, page speed, structured data, indexing control. In 2026, that checklist now extends to AI search: being indexed by Google is no longer synonymous with being cited by AI platforms.

The Study Methodology

The 2025 study analyzed the top 100 commercial keywords by CPC value, examining 781 unique domains across 105 keywords. CMS detection was performed using What CMS's API. The 2016 baseline used 10,000 keywords and 100,000 URLs, providing a long-term trend comparison.

Limitations to note: Results skew toward commercial queries with high CPC values, which may over-represent certain verticals. The sample of 781 domains is smaller than the 2016 dataset, which introduces some variance. And as the study itself notes: CMS is not a ranking factor. Using WordPress does not improve your Google rankings. What it changes is the ease with which you can implement the technical elements that do.

Best CMS for SEO

What the Data Actually Shows

WordPress: Still Dominant for a Reason

WordPress's growth from 18% to 49% over nine years is not coincidental. It reflects a platform that makes the technical implementation of SEO fundamentals genuinely accessible: custom permalink structures, full metadata control, schema markup plugins, XML sitemap generation, image optimization, and straightforward robots.txt management. SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math have further reduced the gap between what WordPress sites can implement and what developers building on custom frameworks do manually.

For teams without dedicated development resources, WordPress removes the dependency on engineering cycles for common SEO tasks. This is the practical reason behind the data.

Next.js: The Developer-First Challenger

Next.js appearing at 2.43% among top-ranking domains is notable given it had zero presence in 2016. It is a React framework used primarily by larger engineering teams — "used by some of the world's largest companies," per their documentation — that offers server-side rendering and static site generation, both of which are beneficial for page speed and crawlability.

The implication: teams building on Next.js are typically larger organizations with engineering capacity to handle the SEO technical layer in code. The framework itself is excellent for performance; the SEO fundamentals still need to be implemented deliberately.

Webflow: The Fastest Riser

A 2,548% increase from 0.06% to 1.54% makes Webflow the fastest-growing CMS in the study. It occupies the space between WordPress's flexibility and a website builder's ease of use: visual design control with access to metadata, structured data, and performance optimization that less capable builders do not expose. Growing adoption among design-led businesses and agencies that need more control than Squarespace without the development overhead of WordPress.

Shopify's Decline Worth Noting

Shopify dropping from 0.40% to 0.26% among top-ranking commercial domains is worth tracking. It does not mean Shopify ranks poorly — it means other platforms are gaining share among the highest-ranking commercial sites. Shopify's SEO limitations (URL structure constraints, limited control over certain technical elements) are well-documented, and the data may reflect larger e-commerce operations migrating to more flexible platforms.

The CMS Decision Framework for 2026

For most businesses without a dedicated engineering team: WordPress. The data supports it, the ecosystem supports it, and the technical SEO control it provides is unmatched at this price point.

For developer-led teams prioritizing performance: Next.js or Gatsby. Both appear in the top-ranking domains data and both offer performance advantages when implemented correctly by teams with the engineering capacity to do so.

For design-focused teams that want more control than a website builder: Webflow. The growth trajectory reflects genuine demand for this category.

For e-commerce: WooCommerce (within WordPress) is the data-supported default. Shopify remains viable but has known limitations for teams needing full technical SEO control.

What to avoid: Choosing a CMS based on marketing claims rather than whether it gives you direct control over crawlability, metadata, structured data, canonical tags, and page speed. Those are the variables that actually matter for rankings — not the CMS brand itself.

What CMS Data Does Not Capture: AI Citation Accessibility

There is a dimension missing from any CMS-focused analysis in 2026, and it is becoming more commercially significant.

Being in Google's index is no longer the only accessibility problem a website faces. AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini — have their own crawler infrastructure and their own retrieval logic. A site that Google crawls and indexes effectively may or may not be accessible to, or cited by, AI systems. The variables that determine AI citation overlap with traditional SEO but are not identical to it.

According to Ahrefs' AI Overviews study, only 13.7% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for the same query. Traditional search ranking and AI citation are measuring different things.

For teams that want to know whether their site — regardless of CMS — is actually being retrieved and referenced by AI platforms, Dageno tracks this at the prompt level: which questions are causing AI systems to cite your content, which citation sources are driving competitor recommendations, and whether your pages are accessible to AI crawlers in the first place. The CMS question is about being found by Google; the AI visibility question is about being cited in AI-generated answers. Both matter, and they require different tools to measure. Free plan available.

References

• Ahrefs – AI Overviews Study: 38% of Searches Show AI Overviews, 13.7% Top-10 Overlap with AI Citations, Domain Authority vs Citation Rate
• Cloudflare – AI Crawler Research: AI Crawler Behavior vs Googlebot, Server Configuration Blocking Risks, Behavioral Detection Methods
• ALM Corp – AI Overviews Surge 2026: Google AI Overviews Expanding Query Coverage, Traditional Organic Traffic Substitution Rates by Vertical
• Safaridigital – AI Overview SEO Statistics: AI Overview Trigger Rate by Industry, CMS Accessibility vs AI Citation Rate Correlation
• Superlines – State of GEO Q1 2026: AI Citation Source Diversity, WordPress vs Next.js AI Accessibility Patterns, Citation Rotation Rates