Case Study: Pew Research Center boosts LLM visibility and ships its largest release with WordPress VIP

Pew Research Center ships its largest release ever in 1 month with WordPress VIP

Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank, faced the challenge of ensuring its research remained visible and accurately represented as audiences increasingly used AI assistants for discovery. With traditional search traffic at risk, they needed to make their content easily crawlable and interpretable by large language models (LLMs) to preserve both their reach and factual accuracy. They partnered with vendor WordPress VIP and its Forward Deployed Engineer service to address this.

With support from a WordPress VIP Forward Deployed Engineer, Pew implemented a new discovery layer on top of their existing publishing system to make content more legible to AI crawlers. The results were significant: within thirty days, ChatGPT became their #2 traffic referrer, up from nearly zero. The project, initially scoped for six months, was fully launched in one. Furthermore, adopting an agentic development model with WordPress VIP's guidance allowed them to ship their largest-ever release, changing 1.5 million lines of code and accelerating their engineering velocity by 3-4x.

Pew Research Center