September 2025 Summaries

As search evolves into an answer feed, driven by AI Overviews and competitors like Perplexity, websites must adapt to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which focuses on how content is cited and consumed in these new experiences. Although AEO is not a new SEO trick, it emphasizes the importance of structured, crawlable, and fast content while deciding which AI systems to support or block. This shift is crucial for future business growth, as LLM-driven traffic shows conversion rates similar to organic search. While AI answer engines could become significant traffic drivers, they currently account for less than 1% of sessions compared to organic search's substantial share. Enterprises like Harper and Akamai are already prepared to scale AEO initiatives by leveraging robust infrastructure and governance, ensuring high-performance delivery and traffic assurance. For most organizations, however, a measured approach with controlled pilots and careful tracking is recommended to optimize infrastructure without overcommitting resources. With no special tags required for AI Overview inclusion, success depends on traditional SEO essentials, but with more precise content structuring and robust infrastructure to maximize visibility and conversion opportunities in AI summaries.

Production AI systems are increasingly being integrated into applications, with Harper offering a platform that facilitates edge deployment of AI, combining database, cache, messaging, and application functions into a unified runtime. This approach minimizes latency, enhances responsiveness, and enables real-time user interaction by positioning AI models close to decision points, thereby improving user experiences and engagement. Harper supports a continuous learning cycle by capturing user interactions as feedback for model improvement, allowing AI agents to evolve and adapt over time. Developers can deploy pre-trained models into Harper with ease, leveraging its seamless integration with existing systems without the complexity of managing separate infrastructures. The platform is demonstrated through a GitHub project featuring a fictional e-commerce company, highlighting how AI agents can be hosted and continuously improved, ensuring applications remain fast, resilient, and capable of self-updating to meet user needs.

Stephen Goldberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Harper, has been recognized as a 2025 Most Admired CEO by the Denver Business Journal for his transformative contributions to web performance technology and his leadership within the Denver business community. Harper, under Goldberg's guidance, has grown into a prominent company impacting global e-commerce by optimizing SEO, improving core web vitals, and delivering scalable, real-time digital experiences. Known for his ethical leadership and commitment to the Denver tech ecosystem, Goldberg has also received accolades such as the Ethical Leaders of the Year award from the University of Denver. Harper's innovative technology streamlines the traditional software stack into a single, efficient system, significantly enhancing site performance and enabling companies to achieve remarkable growth. Goldberg's leadership style emphasizes empowerment, authenticity, and creating lasting opportunities, aligning Harper's growth with Denver's evolving aspirations.

A U.S. mid-market online retailer with a vast product catalog faced challenges with Core Web Vitals and site performance, hindering its growth in search visibility and customer engagement, which ultimately capped revenue expansion. Despite ongoing optimization efforts, mobile scores remained poor, prompting the retailer to implement Harper's Early Hints technology in a 30-day proof of concept (POC). This technology preloads critical assets to improve load times and enhance Core Web Vitals, resulting in significant performance improvements and increased user engagement with minimal engineering effort. The POC demonstrated that faster load times led to longer sessions and more pages viewed, projecting an estimated $600,000 annual revenue uplift and a 6x ROI. The successful trial established a strong business case for expanding Early Hints site-wide and exploring further enhancements like prerendering and advanced caching, aiming to secure long-term competitiveness and sustainable growth by transforming performance improvements into a strategic revenue driver.

A prominent U.S. auto parts retailer faced challenges with site performance and indexation, impacting their SEO and growth potential despite substantial investments. Their Core Web Vitals showed consistent failures, limiting organic growth and rendering additional digital marketing efforts less effective. To address these issues, the retailer conducted a proof-of-concept test with Harper’s Early Hints technology, which uses HTTP 103 to preload critical assets, enhancing site speed and search engine responsiveness without requiring significant code changes. The test resulted in an 8% improvement in page load speed, a 230% surge in page indexation, and an estimated annual revenue increase of $8.6 million, demonstrating the significant business impact of even small performance gains. The success of the test underscores the potential for further optimization through prerendering and advanced caching, aiming for sustained Core Web Vitals improvements and long-term competitiveness in organic search.

Harper's recent advances and recognitions underline its significant role in the digital commerce and data platform landscape. The Holiday Readiness Playbook offers e-commerce teams a tactical guide to optimize systems for peak Q4 traffic, focusing on enhancing speed, resilience, and conversions. Harper's innovations include a 5x faster HNSW vector search through int8 quantization and a unified runtime that accelerates live, personalized apps significantly more than competitors like Vercel. Additionally, Harper's approach to agentic engineering emphasizes the importance of explicit and shared architecture for scalable AI solutions. The company has also developed a nature-restoration game using a single Harper component as the backend, showcasing its versatility across various applications.

Harper, a company recognized for its innovative technology solutions, has been making significant strides in the digital commerce and data platform sectors. It has been named a Sample Vendor in the 2026 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce and won two Data Breakthrough Awards for its open-source data platform and in-memory solution. Harper's unique fused-stack architecture offers performance and cost advantages over competitors like Heroku and Vercel by integrating data, logic, cache, and messaging into a single runtime environment. This approach enables faster and more efficient application performance, particularly in live, personalized apps. The company has also introduced advancements like int8 quantization in its Harper 5.1 update, enhancing search throughput and reducing latency. Additionally, Harper emphasizes the importance of architecture in scaling agentic engineering and has demonstrated its capabilities by building complex applications, such as a nature restoration game, using its integrated backend solutions. Harper's developments are positioned to address challenges in both AI-driven content optimization and web personalization, advocating for cleaner content sources and efficient architectural choices to improve data delivery.

Harper is a scalable, high-performance database platform that offers businesses system-wide flexibility by integrating data, application logic, messaging, and agent development within a unified runtime. It contrasts with Vercel, a low-cost front-end hosting platform focused on web deployment. Harper has earned recognition as a Sample Vendor in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2026, and has won two 2026 Data Breakthrough Awards for Open Source Data Platform of the Year and In-Memory Solution of the Year. The platform has also demonstrated superior performance, running personalized applications 4–14 times faster than Vercel by unifying various processes into one runtime. Furthermore, Harper 5.1 introduces int8 quantization, significantly improving search throughput and reducing latency, although with a slight tradeoff in recall accuracy. Harper's architecture facilitates building diverse applications, such as a nature-restoration game using a single component as the backend, while addressing AI-related challenges in web content optimization by advocating cleaner, more accessible content sources.

Page Cache is a solution designed to optimize page load times by ensuring that product pages are fully formed and instantly delivered to users, supporting both server-side rendered and static origins. It addresses the common issues of slow load times and operational complexity caused by traditional HTML and CDN setups by pre-rendering pages and enriching them with dynamic attributes at the last responsible moment, which reduces cold starts, cache misses, and origin bottlenecks. Running on Harper’s platform, it integrates database, cache, application, and messaging systems within a single runtime to avoid multi-server slowdowns and operational sprawl. With its ability to pre-render pages, inject dynamic attributes, and deliver content globally from a predictable infrastructure, Page Cache offers a scalable solution that enhances SEO, conversion rates, and user experience by minimizing wait times and simplifying operations.