Inside Webflow’s AEO Playbook: Reprogramming SEO for the AI Era
How Webflow’s marketing team is using the same SEO muscle but training differently for the AI era, one rep at a time. One answer at a time.
Every marketer remembers the golden age of keywords.
Stuff the right phrases, climb the SERP, watch the traffic roll in.
You could sprinkle “best something” a few times on a page and ride the Google wave.
Simpler times. But that world’s gone.
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini don’t rank. They reason.
They don’t ask who said it first; they look for who answered it best.
That shift isn’t subtle. It’s seismic.
The SEO/AEO (do you call it GEO?) playbook is changing fast, and as usual, we didn’t get the memo.
Webflow’s growth team (to their credit) is rewriting the rulebook quite openly.
This letter documents Webflow’s evolving AEO strategy, drawn from their team’s interviews, webinars, and case studies, including how they use AirOps.
From Keywords to Questions: The Shift to AEO
AEO has made the “tail” longer.
What used to be four to six-word queries now often stretch past twenty-five.
People no longer type. They ask.
As Guy Yalif (Chief Evangelist at Webflow) explained on GTM Now’s podcast, large language models like ChatGPT interpret full queries and even multi-turn conversations.
That means content can’t just sprinkle keywords anymore; it has to deliver complete, contextual answers that AI engines can confidently quote.
In practice, Webflow’s content team maps the real questions their audience asks at each stage and builds pages that answer them thoroughly: awareness, consideration, purchase, and beyond.
The result is content structured for humans but favored by machines.
Yalif also breaks the impact of this shift into three tough realities every marketer faces: loss of brand control as LLMs paraphrase content and often use wrong citations, lower traffic that’s already giving mini panic attacks to many, and a sea of sameness where it’s harder than ever to stand out.
Webflow’s AEO Framework
Webflow’s four-part AEO framework mirrors classic SEO fundamentals but tweaks them for the AI era.
Content: Create question-focused content that actually answers what buyers ask. Each page is semantically rich, easy to parse, and clustered by topic and intent. Webflow layers in on-page FAQs, structured markup, and original insights to stand out from generic, AI-scraped noise.
Technical: Make your structure readable for machines. Webflow adds schemas, FAQs (instant hit), how-to steps, definitions, and other rich snippets directly inline, helping AI engines extract clear, contextual answers without confusion.
Authority: Backlinks still matter, but brand reputation now carries more weight. Webflow sees every mention on Reddit, YouTube, tech blogs, or Q&A threads as an opportunity to shape how AIs understand and describe the brand
Measurement:Webflow monitors how often it is cited as a source in ChatGPT and other AI tools, tracks its share of voice versus competitors in AI-generated answers, and studies the sentiment and accuracy of those mentions.
The results speak for themselves. Self-signups from AI search channels grew by 8%. The traffic may be smaller in volume, but it is high-intent, with buyers arriving further down the funnel, ready to act.
Webflow ran quiet experiments and rewired its SEO playbook by keeping what worked, fixing what didn’t, and measuring everything in between.
The result was a set of simple but powerful moves.
1. FAQs and Schema
Two old-school SEO tactics found new life in the AEO era.
Vivian Hoang, who leads SEO at Webflow, shared how they turned something as basic as FAQs into a conversion and citation magnet.
On the surface, FAQs seem obvious: good for users, great for SEO, and now gold for LLMs. They help models understand and recommend your brand for mid to long-tail queries like “how does Webflow handle site migrations?”
The challenge, of course, was scale. Researching what people actually ask, writing clear answers, and formatting everything properly can take forever.
So Webflow’s team automated it with AirOps.
Here’s how their workflow runs: It starts by scraping the page to see what already exists. Then it pulls People Also Ask questions from Google, related queries from keyword tools, and real user questions from Perplexity, Reddit, and Quora.
The team even fed in questions from sales calls or user interviews, ensuring the FAQs reflect what real buyers want to know.
The result: structured, brand-aligned, schema-ready FAQs that live inline on pages. Webflow even runs a separate workflow to auto-generate schema markup, helping both search engines and language models understand the relationship between entities, products, and features.
Pages with new FAQ sections saw up to a 24% lift in traffic within two weeks, and nearly half of Webflow’s AI citations came from those pages.
Josh Grant, VP of Growth at Webflow, shared the AirOps workflow in his newsletter : Stacked: The AI Driven GTM Playbook.
AI crawlers love structured data. Schema helps them identify clear answers. FAQs anchor those answers to real buyer intent. Together, they make Webflow’s pages easy to parse, quote, and trust.
It’s proof that you don’t always need new content to win at AEO. You just need to help machines find better answers in what you already have.
2. Keep Content Fresh and Up to Date
Content freshness is now a ranking factor not just for Google but for AI engines too.
Pages updated more recently tend to be cited more often by LLMs.
“Last updated” is no longer a timestamp. It is a quality signal. (And no, changing the date on your blog doesn’t count.)
Webflow’s inbound engine had always relied on a strong library of evergreen content. But keeping it fresh was a grind: keyword research, rewrites, editorial approvals, CMS updates. Each refresh took days, so only a handful made it through every month.
Webflow (again) used AirOps to automate the refresh process without sacrificing quality or voice.
The workflow integrated directly with Webflow’s CMS, analyzing each article against search and AI trends to identify gaps in depth, structure, and clarity. It then suggested targeted edits that were brand-safe, context-aware, and ready to publish in minutes.
The result was clear. What was once a manual effort to refresh 40 to 50 articles a year scaled to dozens each month.
Freshness is not about rewriting everything. It is about learning faster, publishing smarter, and keeping your best answers visible where both people and machines can find them.
3. Brand Presence and Mentions
Backlinks still matter, but brand mentions now do the heavy lifting.
Webflow’s team realized that AI engines don’t just read your website; they read the internet’s opinion of you. LLMs pull context from YouTube, Reddit threads, G2 listings, and publications like TechRadar and Forbes.
Webflow’s comms team identified the most referenced sources in AI-generated answers and focused on showing up there. Business profiles on platforms like G2 and third-party sites were optimized for accurate features and positioning.
It also leaned heavily on Webflow University and creator-led content on YouTube, from affiliate tutorials to influencer walkthroughs, building a consistent presence across channels.
The takeaway is simple: brand authority is no longer built in isolation. It is distributed.
And in the AEO era, what the internet says about you is what the machine believes about you.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Webflow measures AEO performance across three dimensions: presence (are we in the conversation?), performance (are we driving traffic and signups?), and perception (how are AIs portraying us?).
It is a more nuanced scoreboard than traditional SEO rankings, but it ensures focus on meaningful growth instead of vanity metrics. After all, the endgame is business impact.
AI Citations and Presence: Webflow tracks when and where its content is mentioned or cited by AI systems. The team monitors ChatGPT’s visible sources, checks for references in Bing Chat, and uses tools that simulate AI queries to measure visibility. Each mention in an AI-generated answer is treated like a page-one ranking, a clear signal of authority and reach.
Share of Voice vs Competitors: Visibility alone is not enough. Webflow measures how often it appears as the source of truth compared to competitors in categories like website builders and CMS platforms. The higher their share of voice in AI-generated answers, the stronger their AEO moat becomes.
Traffic and Conversions from AI: Webflow tracks referral traffic from AI engines such as ChatGPT and Bing Chat, and measures how that traffic converts. The numbers tell the story. AI-driven signups increased from 2% in late 2024 to 8%, and those visitors converted about six times better than traditional organic traffic.
And here’s the kicker: Webflow achieved all this with the same SEO team, not by spinning a new wheel but by redeploying its expertise toward an AI-aware strategy.
Webflow is using the same SEO muscle but lifting weights differently for AEO.
It’s not about lifting heavier, it’s about mastering the technique.
Experimenting, refining, and getting better with every rep.
One rep at a time. One answer at a time.
Because good marketing is still about form, just a different kind of flex.
Yours Promptly,
Manu