How Webflow gets 10% of signups from AI Search | Vivian Hoang, AEO & SEO Lead @ Webflow

AI search is already driving nearly 10% of Webflow's signups. A key person behind that number is Vivian Hoang, AEO & SEO Lead at Webflow.

In this episode, we'll dig into how Webflow's SEO function has evolved over the years, how Vivian started thinking about answer engine optimization before most people even had a name for it, what's actually working for them in AI search, and how she's using tools like AirOps to scale content without sacrificing quality.

I'm really excited about this one because Vivian isn't speaking about theory here. She's already built the playbook and has the numbers to back it up.

Check out the full episode

Check out the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

What we covered in this episode

• ~10% of Webflow's signups now come from AI search, a real and measurable number that proves AEO is a growth channel worth investing in
• AEO builds directly on a strong SEO foundation; don't abandon SEO, optimize both in parallel
• If you create genuinely authoritative, useful content, you're already doing the right thing for both Google and LLMs
• Webflow shifted from top-of-funnel to mid/bottom-funnel content because conversion rates were higher and ToFU traffic was declining with AI Overviews
• Audit what you already have before creating anything new, refresh high-potential pages, and build from there
• You can't optimize what you don't measure: identify the prompts your audience uses, track your LLM citations, and find your way into the sources LLMs trust in your category
• AEO is a team sport: get leadership bought in with data, educate your marketing team, and run small experiments with visible results before scaling

Auto-generated transcript

Niklas Buschner (00:02.058)
AI Search is already driving nearly 10 % of Webflow's signups and a key person behind that number is Vivian Huang, AEO and SEO lead at Webflow. In this episode, we'll dig into how Webflow's SEO function has evolved over the years, how Vivian started thinking about answer engine optimization before most people even had a name for it, what's actually working for them in AI Search and how she's using tools like Aerobs,

to scale content without sacrificing quality. I'm really excited about this one because Vivian isn't speaking about theory here. She's already built the playbook and has the numbers to back it up. So welcome to the podcast, Vivian.

Vivian (00:42.614)
Thanks for having me, Niklas. It's great to be here.

Niklas Buschner (00:45.262)
excited to have you. Before we get into the AI search stuff, I'd love to hear a bit about your journey. So how did you end up leading AEO and SEO at Webflow?

Vivian (00:55.018)
Yeah, well, I started my career in SEO on the agency side, actually, at a local web developing company based in Oklahoma, which is where I'm from. And I got to work with a lot of different businesses that were both B2B and B2C, as well as nonprofit. The company also had their own CMS platform. So I was doing not only SEO for our clients, but also for our own internal properties. So it kind of felt like a full circle moment when I actually joined Webflow.

Um, that's all I to Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (01:25.71)
Did you also use Webflow at the company then at some point?

Vivian (01:30.42)
No, it was a while ago, so we weren't using Webflow. After a couple of agency roles, though, I moved to an in-house role, and that allowed me to go deeper and work on more long-term projects. And I really started understanding more about what it takes to execute SEO initiatives internally. I then led SEO at Rakuten, which was previously known as Ebates. And I was there for a little over seven and a half years.

Niklas Buschner (01:34.07)
Okay.

Vivian (02:00.334)
for joining a small startup. And then after that, I joined Webflow over three and a half years ago to initially lead our editorial motion in the marketing site. And in the last one and a half years, my role and scope has really expanded to other parts of the site, as well as leading AEO and our AI search strategy.

Niklas Buschner (02:21.038)
Could you imagine when you started Webflow how much would change over the following years?

Vivian (02:27.198)
No, I never would have thought how fast the industry has moved or changed, especially within the last couple of years.

Niklas Buschner (02:37.394)
I think everybody working in SEO probably has the same feeling. But can you give us a sense of what SEO or the whole content operation looked like at Webflow when you started? I mean, it's already now, as you said, three and a half years ago. So just that we maybe move back in time a little bit.

Vivian (02:52.98)
Yeah, definitely. So before I joined, Webflow actually already had like a solid SEO foundation in place. And I think a huge credit of that goes to all of the growth content and SEO folks that came before me. But at the same time, there was a lot of opportunity for really to expand our SEO content strategy and editorial motion to just increase our overall organic visibility and just capture more. Since I've joined,

Wellflow as a business has also evolved. So we went from being known as a no-code website builder primarily for designers and developers to now a visual website experience platform.

you know, now we're moving more up market. We work with a lot of businesses. Our platform has evolved to now include native, a native CMS, personalization, localization, analytics, and now AEO visibility. And with that evolution comes, opens up like a lot of new SEO territory for us to expand to new content strategies and topics to cover. And I think one of the biggest shifts really is that we've moved away from chasing

traffic and rankings to looking at SEO and now AEO more holistically. And we're also customer zero. So one of the fun parts of my job has been to work with our awesome product and engineering teams on ways to make the platform also more useful for our customers.

Niklas Buschner (04:26.83)
Cool. So what would you say are the biggest changes if you had to name one or two from when you started or maybe the first couple of months after you started to now as of April 2026?

Vivian (04:37.535)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest changes is just in the ways that we operate, I operate. When I joined our content strategy was very manual. We still work with a great agency on.

generating content that's focused at capturing some of the content or the search traffic. But we've shifted a lot in the topics that we cover. So we've moved from a lot of top of funnel type of topics to more of a focus on mid to bottom funnel. And also in the ways that we operate, like now we have a lot of workflows and use AI that's embedded in some of our processes to really

scale out the content.

Niklas Buschner (05:27.692)
Okay, so here's something that I'd like to get your opinion on real quick because I recently had a guest that made an argument for top of the final content. So I repeat for top of the final content. And as you also said yourself, you moved away from it. And the argument that my guest made was that she still believes in top of the final content for a topical authority.

Vivian (05:54.485)
Mm-hmm.

Niklas Buschner (05:54.703)
a play and also for an internal linking play. what's your... So do you find this a convincing argument?

Vivian (06:03.113)
No, I would actually totally agree with that. And I think it depends on your category, your industry, and your brand. I think especially if you're in a category that isn't well known or you're defining your category, top of funnel can really help with.

know, building that topical authority. And for Webflow, we already had a lot of that established authority around that type of funnel. although those topics were originally driving a lot of traffic for us, especially with the shift in AI, we started noticing like a lot of decline for those topics. And...

we started focusing more on the mid to bottom funnel content, which we saw had higher conversion rates.

Niklas Buschner (06:53.132)
And at what point did you start thinking about AI search or answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization, however we want to call it? Do you have a preference? You probably call it AEO, right? Okay. Yeah, you obviously call it. Yeah, it's a stupid question. Obviously you call it AEO because Webflow just launched an AEO tool. But at what point did you start thinking about it as something that needs your attention or dedicated attention of your team?

Vivian (06:59.851)
Yes.

Vivian (07:04.267)
Yeah, well we call it AEO a workflow.

Vivian (07:12.701)
Yeah, well, when it started, yeah.

Vivian (07:19.637)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, when it started, I don't think we had a name for it. And for me, it felt like a slow build rather than some lightning bolt moment.

We were already starting to pay attention to AI search, especially when Google announced their source generative experience, which then rolled out to what we all know now as AI overviews. I would say around 2024, like mid two years ago, we were starting to answer some questions around how do we monitor how we show up in LLMs? How do we appear in some of the top sources that were being cited in AI overviews?

But the data at that point hadn't really shown that LLMs were meaningfully disrupting Google's market yet. And at the time, we weren't really being reactive. My belief was that if you create genuinely authoritative, useful content, you're already doing the right thing. Because I think what earns Google citations is largely what earns LLM citations too. And then back then, I also believed that driving brand awareness would be a bigger factor.

in the future with the halo effects on SEO, of more people talking about Webflow, and just external sites and articles organically mentioning Webflow. So last year,

Vivian (08:49.055)
when we started seeing more of that show up in our numbers, our strategy wasn't really a pivot. It was more like an extension of our existing SEO strategy. So we formalized an AI search strategy that was built on top of our SEO, shared it with leadership across all of marketing. And I may drive the channel, but I think AEO is also like a team sport. So all of the great work across our product marketing, our brand, community,

community, content, affiliates, customer marketing, basically our whole marketing team really contributes to our AI visibility.

Niklas Buschner (09:28.246)
And would you say that it's in any sense helpful to be based in San Francisco with Google and OpenAI and Anthropic and all of these having offices there?

Vivian (09:37.996)
you

Yeah, I wouldn't say that's, I mean, it is great to be in the city and around like the environment, but I wouldn't say that's necessarily an advantage. I think the biggest advantage is just having your leadership and your marketing team all bought in. And for us, I think it was, I was very lucky because our team saw it not just like as an internal strategy, but also a problem that a lot of our customers were also facing. So AEO really became like a company motion to not only show up and

AI search, but also to help our customers do the same by sharing our learnings and then just building solutions into our platform.

Niklas Buschner (10:16.567)
Okay, so before we move into the great results that you unquestionably got, would you agree with the statement that someone told me that it's actually probably easier to infiltrate the CIA than getting to talk to someone from either Google that works on the AI search experience or OpenAI or any other of these companies?

Vivian (10:40.275)
Yeah, I would probably agree with that.

Niklas Buschner (10:42.351)
Okay, good. Then we have that sorted. So let's talk about some of the results that you got and Webflow has already been very outspoken about it, which I, from a viewer perspective, really value because it's so cool that someone with your reputation brings actual numbers to the table. So as I said, AI Search now drives nearly 10 % of signups, but I can imagine that this didn't happen overnight.

Vivian (10:45.418)
Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (11:10.521)
just like from one day to the other. So can you walk us through a little bit the journey of how you got there?

Vivian (11:10.57)
Right.

Vivian (11:16.459)
Yeah, so like I mentioned, our AEO strategy was really built on top of a strong SEO foundation and also on top of a great brand. And that's just thanks to years of investment from teams across Webflow. And so it's not just one thing that I did. It's from years of that brand strength that really compounds.

So when we started thinking through our strategy, we looked at both on-site owned content optimizations as well as off-site and all of the different levers that we could pull across third party publications, Reddit, business publications and review sites. So on our own property, we were looking at content that we could optimize.

figuring out different experiments we could run. And then across all of our offsite, the team as a whole really activated and moved really quickly there, working with our affiliates and partners, coms. Our customer marketing was optimizing our G2 profiles and making sure we were getting really great quality reviews.

And we had a team across marketing and product and customer success all really engaging in Reddit in an authentic way. So yeah, I would say that it's just...

AEO is really like, I approach it as a portfolio. There's going to be a lot of different levers, a lot of things that you can test. And the goal is really to figure out what works and what doesn't and just scale what works.

Niklas Buschner (13:09.123)
So is it fair to say that to drive results that are close, as close as meaningful as they've been to Webflow, you have to basically make it an all hands on deck motion where basically the whole company checks if they can make a contribution to it because you just listed like a couple of teams that have worked on it besides just it being you or maybe being the SEO team, so to say. So is it fair to say

that it's all hands on deck for a success.

Vivian (13:41.662)
Yeah, I would say that there's a bit of education around how AEO works and making sure you're activating different parts of your team and marketing team to really drive great results. Because having a strong brand will only benefit you for AEO.

Niklas Buschner (14:02.775)
And what would you say is one or two experiments that have proven the most outsized and impact? So things that have really driven a lot of results and maybe also unexpectedly.

Vivian (14:18.847)
Yeah, I would say one of the most unexpected ones was our FAQs experiment. So like last year, I had a hypothesis that adding structured FAQs to our core feature pages would help improve our visibility as well as how LLMs were talking about our brand and our features.

So FAQs answer really like mid to long tail questions. And I think the Q &A structure also kind of directly aligns with how AI systems process and synthesize and provide information. So at the time, our feature pages really described what we do, but they didn't really just answer specific questions that people had.

about each of those different features. So I actually built a workflow partnering with AirOps that would help automate that FAQ process. So.

The reason why I used AirApps is because FAQ creation can be very manual. It takes time to discover what are the questions people ask, then build out the questions and answer set, and making sure that all of that aligns with your brand and product messaging. So with the workflow in AirApps, all of that is handled automatically from pulling questions around like people also ask, keyword research, real questions that users had,

Reddit or forums. We could also add in the option to add in questions that we might see come up in sales calls.

Vivian (16:02.037)
Then the workflow builds out those on-brand answers using our product docs and help documentation, and then outputs the FAQs and schema markup automatically. I think the surprising thing was when we launched it, we saw over 330 new citations come directly to those specific core feature pages, which made up 57 % of all new citations across Webflow during that period.

I think a 24 % increase in impressions to those pages, which meant that they were showing up higher more frequently in AI search or in AI overviews. And so it became like a repeatable system that we could roll out to cross like more feature and solution pages.

Niklas Buschner (16:51.224)
And how many pages did you actually touch in that experiment?

Vivian (16:55.101)
Yeah, we only touched six pages, six core feature pages.

Niklas Buschner (16:59.352)
Okay, so these six pages actually made quite big of a difference. And did you roll out this FAQ playbook, if we can call it like that, also then to other pages after that?

Vivian (17:03.388)
Mm-hmm, yes.

Vivian (17:12.019)
Yeah, so we also rolled out FAQs on two more feature and solution pages across all of our template category pages. We actually also tried testing out adding FAQs in blog content. It didn't have nearly the same impact as it did across some of the other types of pages.

Niklas Buschner (17:34.34)
And do we have any hypothesis why that is?

Vivian (17:37.323)
My hypothesis is that on the blog content, the FAQs were more informational. It didn't really speak directly about our products. And I think if you're creating content that AI can already answer by itself, it's not going to have as much impact.

Niklas Buschner (18:00.836)
Hmm. Okay. what else did you do to, get to nearly 10 % of AI search signups? You mentioned like a couple of buckets, like onsite Reddit, offsite reviews. but what's another experiment that you can share that you're proud of or that, had made, made a great contribution.

Vivian (18:22.355)
Yeah, think another, like we've been running a lot of different experiments across our blog. Another one we tested was adding external citations and data and statistics. That also saw a pretty significant impact, not only for like AI search traffic, but for non-grant SEO traffic as well.

Niklas Buschner (18:47.546)
So you basically just walk us through because for you it's like it's super simple because you already did it. if I can, if I imagine like I'm a software company and I have a blog and I have some content there, then I would look for ways to add like external data points, probably from verified sources in any sense, or how would I go about replicating what you had success with?

Vivian (19:06.9)
Yeah.

Vivian (19:13.107)
Yeah, what we did was we had a test group and a control group. And for our test group, we looked at places in the content where we could add statistics or research study or external citation to back up a claim. Did research around what types of things we could add.

partnered with our great agency to help add the content and update it and then tested whether that had any impact compared to the control group. So I think like, yeah, for any company with a blog or with content, thinking through like...

different hypotheses like this and doing a pre-post test against a control group can pretty quickly show what works and what doesn't.

Niklas Buschner (20:13.488)
If you create content or if you update content you already mentioned Arabs for your FAQ project now I think depending on where listeners come from if they come from the US. They are probably very aware of Arabs if they come from Europe I think it depends a little bit some people that follow my content for quite some time have probably heard of Arabs before but can you give listeners that

Vivian (20:20.648)
Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (20:39.844)
don't know Aerobs and don't know what they do and why this is a tool that you use. Can you give us a sense of what it is and like how you deployed it?

Vivian (20:49.746)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I will give you an example, especially for our content refresh. So a couple of years ago, we were still refreshing content the manual way, which was very slow and time consuming. And I was evaluating a lot of different AI content tools at the time, but none of them really met that quality bar. When I first discovered AirOps, were a work, like, agentic workflow kind of.

I would say that was what really drew me in.

I think my first use case was like, can we use this tool and this platform to really automate our content refresh workflows and take some of those manual processes and do it in like an automated way? So I brought them on initially to see if we could automate that while still maintaining like those quality standards, that brand voice and tone and those product messaging guidelines, which I think Airhouse is really great at because you can build all of that context

into your knowledge bases, can reference them in your workflow. So you're not just generating AI content, you are generating content that's grounded in your real brand and data and context. So within a few weeks, I was actually pretty amazed at some of the outputs that it generated and also how much time is saved from research to brief creation to the content and staging and publishing actually in Webflow. Yeah. So from there,

it's just been like a game changer across so many other workflows.

Niklas Buschner (22:31.345)
Okay, so can you walk us through for example how you built such a workflow because I mean I can imagine a couple of people have already used something like Zapier or Make or NNN and they know okay I can have like different actions etc. But you mentioned something like pulling in the context and having the brand kit and like there's all of these like new things. So how does it actually work? Like how do you ensure that when you create content and I mean if you do it with a workflow?

Vivian (22:51.978)
Yes.

Niklas Buschner (23:00.581)
You also do it with AI. So how do you ensure that it meets the quality bar and that you can publish it also safely without, for example, risking being penalized by a Google core update or like losing your citations? And I mean, there's all this discussion about AI content around. So how do you make AI content good? So to say.

Vivian (23:22.76)
Yeah, yeah, I think for all of my different workflows, I actually start with what good looks like and what is like the end output that I'm trying to achieve. What are all of the different inputs that I need to get there? And so from there, I map out all of the different contexts that I need to build or to pull. And that includes our brand voice and tone guidelines.

our own SEO best practices, now layering on AEO best practices. What is all of the...

different nuances of our brand messaging that we need to get right. So I build all of that first, and then I scaffold out the workflow. we'll just kind of map out what are all of the different inputs and steps for that workflow. And then I just test and iterate each step until I get what I want, then move on to the next, and then so on. And then, so once I have first drafts, I then will review it

share it out to other stakeholders like our product marketing, content, or sometimes even legal teams and get their feedback. And then I know any patterns in their feedback that might need revising. think all of that gets updated back in either the context or the workflow prompts itself. So I think this the principle is like, know, AI does all of the heavy lifting on like research, drafting, but we still own like the strategy, the review, the quality.

and so nothing goes live without us reviewing it first.

Niklas Buschner (25:06.211)
Okay, but if you have the workflow built basically and then you start the content refresh process with I don't know a couple of pages then this process is end to end or does this process then also involve a review from the legal team, the cons team or whoever might have a say in that or are these teams only giving feedback on

Vivian (25:24.958)
Yeah.

Right.

Niklas Buschner (25:32.581)
the context and the guidelines and everything that goes into the workflow, but the individual refreshed pieces then go through the pipeline without touch.

Vivian (25:40.753)
Yeah. Yeah, it really depends on the workflow. So for us, for the content refresh workflow, I have all of those guidelines, the brand voice and tone, the product marketing and messaging guidelines, which we get from our product marketing teams. And then so all of that context is built out. And then with our refresh workflow, we have, I intentionally built in friction points into the workflow.

to make sure that I review different parts of outputs. So we have a step where I will review the content brief. If everything looks good, then it kicks off the next part of the workflow, generating the different updates to the content. And then from there, we also have a point where I will review each...

or my team will review different parts of the updated content, make sure it looks good. Also make sure that we review where it mentions Webflow to make sure it speaks about our product and our features correctly. And then from there, it will go and stage everything in our CMS ready for publish.

Niklas Buschner (26:56.28)
And which level of autonomy have you already reached? for the content? So how much editing is still required? Like on average?

Vivian (27:04.694)
I would say very minimal editing. And I think all of it goes into the type of context that we have built out and different specific guidance that we give the workflow.

Niklas Buschner (27:18.958)
And can you give us a sense about the size of this context? is it like, are these different guidelines? it like two, so the equivalent of two are Google Docs pages? Is it rather like 10 pages, 20 pages? Obviously it's probably written in Markdown, so it's LLM interpretable, but can you give us a sense of the size of it?

Vivian (27:37.16)
Yeah.

Vivian (27:42.663)
Yeah, mean, it's quite a lot for our refresh workflows. It's like all of our brand voice and tone guidelines, our product messaging, our different personas. We have different, I have different workflows for like creating comparison content, like competitor pages. And so the context for that is also a lot more. have like certain messaging guidelines for each of our features.

how we talk about Webflow. And then I also make sure that it pulls in our help documentation to make sure that it gets all of their different features right.

Niklas Buschner (28:28.561)
What would you say because you are obviously doing this for quite some time already? What would you say how much of the increase in autonomy is also driven by model improvements?

Vivian (28:42.984)
Yeah, I would say it's a big part, especially now with Claude. A lot of it, the autonomy has been moved to the AI now.

Niklas Buschner (28:57.997)
Do you have preference for models? You already mentioned Claude.

Vivian (29:02.236)
Yeah, I would say in the last two to three months my preference has been Claude because there's just so much that it can do and I've actually been using it a lot for more like data analysis, reporting, just productivity stuff.

Niklas Buschner (29:21.937)
I'm so happy to hear that because I bought like a team's plan for the whole agency for Claude already back in November 2024. So now seeing all these smart folks also moving over to Claude makes me very happy. So welcome to the Claude family. No, no, no, just kidding. But

Vivian (29:40.018)
Yeah. Thanks.

Niklas Buschner (29:46.188)
so you're talking about content refresh. You already talked about content refresh, but you also mentioned creating content, around the comparison content. So, and for refreshing content, I think even people that are skeptic about AI, they can see the argument that if you already have a solid content base that you then refresh with AI, it's a different story than creating something from a blank sheet of paper. doesn't sound right. Like a blank screen. Let's, let's call it like that.

Vivian (30:14.708)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (30:16.227)
So what changes if you do not approach it with content refresh, but content generation from scratch?

Vivian (30:27.058)
Yeah, so do you mean like generating net new content with AI? Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (30:31.319)
Yeah, generating net new content without a base like I have this article, I want to refresh it, but hey, I want to produce this completely new article about this completely new topic. So how do you approach it differently? Maybe first question, because I just implied that you do it differently. Maybe it's not true.

Vivian (30:45.095)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we actually work with our agency Graphite on a lot of NetNew content and I think a lot of the content...

ideas just comes from deeply understanding your target audiences. And for Webflow, we have a lot of different ICPs. And they all have different challenges or pain points, different use cases. And so our goal is really to answer all of those questions and intent with content across the funnel. And

For AI content specifically, I wouldn't say that AI content only works well, but AI assisted content with a human in the loop does. So we're not like one-shotting prompts to generate content. All of our content is either human written with our great agency or by the different teams that's producing content at Webflow, or it's content that's generated using a lot of brand context. So either way, it comes from

you know, having that context, also the taste and judgment and knowing what resonates with your audience and making sure it aligns with your brand.

Niklas Buschner (31:57.298)
And would you say that it's possible to create similar quality content with AI compared to content being created by humans? So skilled editors and like people that have been content writers for their career?

Vivian (32:11.464)
Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I think it varies and it really depends. Typical SEO answer. For us, yeah, right. For us, we also have a lot of great editorial type of content too with website examples. And I think that really needs a human writer and editor to make sure that we're speaking genuinely, authentically about these examples.

Niklas Buschner (32:43.835)
You mentioned this content format, the 15 small business website examples for inspiration, the 14 examples of great portfolio websites, et cetera. I love this format. I've been showing it to my team for quite some time. And I know you probably can't share specific, but can you give me a sense about if my hypothesis that this content converts really well, if this is true?

Vivian (33:10.268)
Yes, think that it does. We've seen this type of content format do really well for us, not just for SEO, but actually for AI as well. My thought is that this type of content is very high intent. It's not something that AI or LLM can easily answer. You really need human judgment and taste. When someone's looking for different types of website examples, they want

Niklas Buschner (33:11.793)
Yeah

Vivian (33:40.192)
to see the end product. having that visit website intent I think only helps with this type of content.

Niklas Buschner (33:51.494)
Hmm. And now if you look at, for example, the model advancements that have happened over the last weeks and month, so I don't even call it years because it's going so quickly. And also, how deep you are already in with, with workflows and, and the Arabs platform, et cetera. So can you see a future where we basically have full end to end automated content processes?

Vivian (34:02.632)
Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (34:20.358)
Definitely given that there has to be some sort of high quality input and Yeah, probably ever growing contact space, but Do you think we will at some point reach a point where there's no more automation or will we basically move to? fully autonomous content creation as with for example software engineering where

Vivian (34:43.561)
Mm-hmm.

Niklas Buschner (34:43.898)
A cloud code with Opus 4.7 and a million tokens context window can basically create working applications end end with very little context that you provide.

Vivian (34:52.468)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, especially with how fast things are moving, I think it's a little bit hard to say, but I think at the same time, there will always need to be a human in the loop, whether that's someone who's guiding the AI, building out that context, or even reviewing for final quality. But yeah, I think that even if we move into like the fully autonomous automated workflows, there still needs to be someone in the loop, a person.

Niklas Buschner (35:21.712)
And do you actually publish more at Webflow now with AI than pre-AI or same or even less?

Vivian (35:30.666)
I would say we publish less net new, we're refreshing more content, focusing a lot more on the mid to bottom funnel type of content.

Niklas Buschner (35:42.247)
And the reason is because you already have built up such a big portfolio and then there's so there would only be room for example, for doing what HubSpot did and I have full respect for HubSpot and their pivot. But when they created this content, which was how to do the Shrek emoji, then where you basically you're looking for new content ideas that might not be so deeply tied to the product.

Vivian (36:01.515)
Yeah, right, definitely. mean, that's part of it. mean, have, workflow has like years of great content. and now it's for us, it's like what content actually moves the needle, what makes like business impact and focusing there.

Niklas Buschner (36:19.41)
Okay, let's speak about business impact because I see a lot of discussion around it. So there's, would say two types of people. So there are people that are talking about AI visibility and everything like brand management and share of voice, et cetera. And that this is the new main KPI. So we move away from clicks and from traffic. And then there's the other part that basically says, we shouldn't. So we maybe should use visibility as a proxy.

at most, we have to talk about leads, we have to talk about signups, we to talk about pipeline, we to talk about revenue. So if you say content has to move the needle, what does the needle look like?

Vivian (37:01.065)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I would say both parties are right in a way. For us, I look at our measurement in three different layers, so making sure we are tracking AI visibility.

and citations as kind of like leading indicators, but we really report on our conversions and the business impact. And so when I am thinking through our content strategy, I do look at like leading indicators to see, you what are the different areas that we need to cover, but.

we focus a lot on the type of content that will drive sign-ups and new customers.

Niklas Buschner (37:52.467)
Okay, which visibility monitoring platform do you use for Webflow?

Vivian (38:02.237)
Well, we are now starting to use our own platform. Yes.

Niklas Buschner (38:04.992)
yeah, of course. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely a topic that we have to tap into. We didn't really talk about it yet. So Webflow just launched an AEO platform. So to say, can you give us maybe a little sneak peek? Obviously people can click the link in the description where we will link it, but can you give us a sneak peek about what this is about? So is it a new monitoring software? Is it connected to the Webflow product? So how does it look like?

Vivian (38:31.498)
Yeah, I I think that there are a lot of great tools out there to monitor your AI visibility platform. We also use other tools. But our goal is really to provide teams that don't have access to this, a feature within Webflow that allows them to track their AI visibility all in one platform. And so it will eventually give you visibility into how you're doing across your prompts that you care about, for topics that you care

about, you'll be able to use that to inform your decisions, track your conversions, and improve your AI visibility.

Niklas Buschner (39:15.058)
Okay, so it's basically end-to-end connected between visibility and then actions that you take if you're a Webflow customer and already have your content living in the Webflow CMS anyway. Okay, okay, that definitely sounds smart. So everybody that is listening to that and that is already running on Webflow or maybe considering moving over to Webflow from WordPress or other CMS tools, probably you should check it out. We'll put a link in the description.

Vivian (39:21.47)
Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (39:43.004)
And I can imagine that you are now also doing AEO for Webflow with the Webflow AEO tool, right? And how does it feel? Does it feel like a meta moment, so to say?

Vivian (39:49.329)
Yeah, we're starting to.

Vivian (39:55.538)
Yeah, think, again, I think I mentioned this, but we're customer zero. so like hoping that by solving some of these problems, we're also solving problems that our customers are facing and building what I would want to see in a tool into like the platform.

Niklas Buschner (40:15.186)
Okay, very cool. We'd already talked about Aerobs, we talked about AI workflows in Aerobs, et cetera. I'd also like to know, because probably you're also using AI quite a bit for other things. You mentioned data analytics, et cetera. Can you share a couple of your favorite workflows? I have to say also maybe surprising workflows, workflows that people maybe wouldn't expect.

Vivian (40:41.233)
Yeah, don't know if this is like SEO specific, but for me, I have a workflow that runs.

every day using Claude that will give me a daily briefing for the day. So what's on my agenda? What do I need to focus on? What are my top priorities? And like a three day horizon of things looking ahead in the week. And it scans my Slack, my emails, my Notion, and then a separate workflow that will do an end of the day sweep. So then it captures all of my to-dos and drops it into an inbox in my Notion so that

I don't have to spend time figuring out what are all of the things that I need to follow up on, what are all the outstanding tasks, the AI does that automatically for me.

Niklas Buschner (41:37.244)
So do you also like how much time do you still spend in the tools like no matter if it's notion or slack or or the calendar or maybe even Gmail and how much time do you spend in cloud for example then paying the tools wire MCP or direct connection.

Vivian (41:55.08)
Yeah, yeah, I would say I spend less time now definitely scanning my emails and slacks to find all of the conversations and action items I need to do, like way less time. And now I can just scan my daily briefing, follow up immediately, like with whatever action items needs to be done. And so it saved me a lot of time doing that.

Niklas Buschner (42:23.863)
And have you also already started building new internal tools? Like obviously you have the Webflow AEO Suite now, but like little tools for certain use cases with Cloud Code for you or the team to make something more handy?

Vivian (42:39.186)
Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know how much I can share, like definitely have been using Claude a lot more to better like just small internal things like maybe one thing is

So we have a lot of great webinars on our site. And I built out a workflow in Air apps to generate and repurpose content from those webinars. But sometimes we just want to find insights in a webinar to back up something in an article. So one thing that I've actually done pretty recently and need to start rolling out more is finding specific insights or quotes for any given topic.

to a little tool in Claude project that will do that.

Niklas Buschner (43:28.349)
Very cool. And now talking about the experiments again, you obviously shared a couple of experiments that worked very well. Can you also share an experiment that maybe didn't drive results or something where you had high hopes, but then in the end it didn't work out. And I'm asking specifically because as people from the AB testing and like conversion rate optimization side always say, you don't really win with the tests.

that succeed but you rather win with a test that fail because you know what you shouldn't implement and shouldn't roll out. So is there anything that comes to mind?

Vivian (44:06.567)
Yeah, think so we talked about the website listicles. One thing we did was.

to see whether restructuring some of those website listicles would work. So we tested moving the visual examples above some of the supporting sections. And we actually saw a negative impact on both AI visits to those pages and as well as SEO traffic. So we rolled that back. And I think my hypothesis was AI and

search engines need that supporting content to kind of set up the article before we get into some of the more visual examples.

Niklas Buschner (44:51.379)
Okay, so for everybody that does not have the page, like just visually in front of them, to give an idea, so there's these pages like 15 small business website examples for inspiration, right, these ones? And then you have like a great introduction where it says, small businesses are incredibly diverse and this diversity reveals itself in the websites. And then there's a bit of context and then there's why is website design for small business important, et cetera, et cetera. And then we go into the examples and you basically scrap that

Vivian (45:21.831)
We moved the supporting content all below the visual examples. And yeah, so that experiment didn't work as we expected, so we moved all of that content back up.

Niklas Buschner (45:32.788)
Cool. I think this is a really cool experience because honestly, I could see a client of ours come to us when we produce similar content. So for example, we have a client that works. It's a funnel builder. It's like a type form alternative. It's called Hayflow. It's a German company. And when we create content that is like quiz funnel examples, et cetera, then we also have the supporting section at the top.

Vivian (46:01.671)
Mm-hmm.

Niklas Buschner (46:01.671)
And I could definitely see a client tell us, yeah, we don't need that. We should definitely start with the examples already. People don't want to read that. But then it's a very convincing argument to say, know, Webflow test this and Vivian told me and it didn't work. So let's not do it. Let's not burn our hands. They have already done that. Cool. So thanks for sharing. We already talked a lot about onsite, but you also mentioned offsites. Is there something where you feel like

Vivian (46:17.851)
Right. Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (46:28.563)
This has had a great impact or maybe like even an outsized impact because people are obviously always looking for invest as little time as possible to get as much impact as possible that you saw concerning offsite. So no matter if it's Reddit or review sites or any other aspect.

Vivian (46:47.945)
Yeah

I think all of it really contributes. can't point to one single thing that will have the most outsized impact. And I really think it depends on your brand, your category, the types of prompts that you care about, because those will have different citation sources that show up the most frequently. So I think it really depends. Again, typical answer. But I would say look at your priority prompts.

to see what are the citation sources that are showing up. What do LLMs trust and cite the most and see if you can get your brand placed there. And again, it just goes back to having a strong brand.

Niklas Buschner (47:39.411)
Hmm.

Vivian (47:44.04)
making sure that you show up across all of these different publications, across your social, engage authentically in Reddit, in your own subreddit if you can. So yeah, again, it's like kind of a portfolio approach.

Niklas Buschner (48:01.298)
So no quick wins, unfortunately, and like the one single, how do you say, silver bullet that you have to discover. And then suddenly your AEO visibility rises from 5 % to 95%.

Vivian (48:09.682)
Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think for your like anyone who's watching like their brand just I think the silver bullet will vary, you know, just again test what works and what doesn't.

Niklas Buschner (48:28.68)
Hmm. Okay. And what would you say? What is the biggest misconception you still see people having about AI search or AEO?

Vivian (48:38.025)
That again, that there is a silver bullet that one tactic will work. I think it is a overall strategy and it really comes from, again, deeply understanding who your audience is, the questions that they're asking and that they care about and forming a strategy from that.

Niklas Buschner (48:58.1)
Okay, so do you have an opinion on now publishing all content in Markdown format? Because I just saw a LinkedIn post two days ago from someone that said, yeah, we started this experiment and we're 14 days in and it already looks great. We have, I think it was a hundred clicks more from Google or something like that. Yeah, wow, yeah, yeah, I can imagine how much clicks you have, but yeah.

Vivian (49:18.089)
Wow.

Niklas Buschner (49:26.458)
What do you think why that is that there's always this new? thing where people feel like wow this is deaf this is so smart like Having everything in markdown having the LLMs or txt having everything with schema now and that Then there's this hype train rolling through LinkedIn all the time

Vivian (49:43.912)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not sure. think there is a lot of hype and people are always looking for quick wins. But I think you need a long-term strategy. Yes, you can focus on quick wins, but as long as you're using that alongside a long-term strategy, you're not like...

just working on quick wins for the sake of quick wins itself. And so that's what I would just say.

Niklas Buschner (50:24.944)
Okay, now if you have convinced someone that wants to start out and they're not looking for the quick win, but they acknowledge that you need a long term strategy, but they still ask themselves, where do I start? What would you say are the two to three things that they should start with?

Vivian (50:40.68)
Yeah.

Thank

Yeah, I would say first audit your website and what you have already. Take your most important pages and ask, does this directly answer questions that my audience might ask about this topic, about my brand? And based on that, build out content if you don't already have it. Refresh your content. And I think that is one of the highest leverage things you can do is just take an audit of what you have and build upon that.

And then second, would say, start tracking because you can't optimize what you're not measuring. So figure out what are the prompts that your audience care about and use to find a solution like yours. Who is citing you? What questions do they have?

What are the top citation sources that LMs prioritize and trust for those types of questions? And look at trying to get into those sources.

Vivian (51:49.169)
And then third, think I mentioned this already, but like AEO is a team sport. You know, start educating and activating your team, your marketing team, and getting all of them involved and aligned, because I think that will carry a halo effect of how you show up as a brand in different sources.

Niklas Buschner (52:12.434)
Nice. That's definitely very helpful and very operational. Now we have senior people listening to this podcast, but we also sometimes have junior people listening. And if we have someone that is still early in their career and they're seeing all this change in the SEO space and they're seeing people like you that are talking about workflows and workflow building and air ops and all that kind of stuff. If you had to recommend someone that is starting out as like junior SEO manager or junior

maybe even content manager or content writer, what would you recommend are like the skills or like the areas that people should learn more about, dive deeper into so they future-proof their career?

Vivian (52:57.498)
Yeah, let's say a couple of things. think...

Really just getting your hands on the tools themselves and building, I think gives you the best experience. And for me, think that's what made a big difference when I was learning AirOps or different AI tools. So it's getting in there, finding a use case that you have, building. And I think from there, you get so many ideas about what other things you can build. And then secondly is really learn and understand how LLMs and Google search work.

because I think having that understanding is a good foundation for building out your AEO or your SEO strategy.

Niklas Buschner (53:43.19)
Okay cool, so everybody listening to this follow Vivian's advice then you might also at some point be an SEO and AEO lead at a great company like Webflow. Vivian, thanks so much for taking the time today. It has been a really really insightful talk, really enjoyed it. I think you dropped a lot of knowledge for people to try to take and replicate for their company. Now to close the talk I always have a final question and I...

Vivian (54:11.925)
bluntly stole this the idea for this question from Lenny's podcast because I think it's a great podcast and I Like to listen to it myself and everybody that does not know it probably in the u.s. Everybody knows it but in Europe It's still it's just gaining popularity. You should definitely go check it out But my question is what didn't we talk about that we should have talked about?

Vivian (54:36.69)
Hmm, think we covered a lot of different things. And, hmm, good question. Maybe about the internal challenge of AEO being a team sport.

Niklas Buschner (54:50.773)
Hmm.

Vivian (54:53.736)
Yeah, I think a lot of teams now, I I feel lucky because at Webflow, it is such a team sport and everyone is moving forward in the same direction. But at other companies, I think it might be a little bit different. You might be fighting for resources or trying to even get your leadership bought in. And so I think, again, maybe there's a bit of education there and trying to get everyone aligned about.

why it's important, why it builds on a great SEO foundation. Like you shouldn't get rid of your SEO channel. And so I think that might be a challenge that people are facing. What are your thoughts on that?

Niklas Buschner (55:40.938)
And what can what can I know you you are the guest on this on this podcast and I want to extract your wisdom. No, I can definitely share my thoughts. But before I do that, what can you share from what went well at Webflow? Obviously, that people can learn from.

Vivian (56:00.713)
Yeah, I think what went well is like when we first started it was

Not a lot of folks understood what AI, AEO is and so, and what to do about it, first of all. So I think what helped was putting together a strategy and first explaining and setting the stage of like, why is important? What we're seeing across the industry, what we're seeing in our own numbers, sharing that with like leadership and then across marketing.

to really show these are the different levers that you can pull. This is why it's important.

Vivian (56:46.67)
and yeah, I think that this just should start there.

Niklas Buschner (56:51.199)
Hmm. Okay. I would agree. I would also say, if you want to convince people, you have to show them that it matters. So I was a big fan always of, so I got this metaphor from another podcast guest. sometimes there have to be people that, run ahead like two, three Hills into the future and they, try something out and then they come back to the group and then they basically.

Vivian (57:11.688)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (57:21.497)
tell them what they saw. And this could be a small group of people doing a little experiment and then basically showing the whole company, hey, look, we did this thing. And now if you ask ChetGBT, it doesn't tell you that as it did before, but now it tells you this, which is driven by sources. And in these sources, it's our content or it's content where we are mentioned. And this is what we did to get mentioned there.

Vivian (57:55.996)
Mm-hmm.

Niklas Buschner (58:17.141)
And I feel like this really opens eyes already for people because I mean we are in a bubble of a bubble of like, hey, you know, experts, you especially, but then we have people that I think want to see the relevance, but they also see people talking about Markdown and LLM, TXT and blah, blah. And they feel like, wow, there's a lot of people that claim to have figured it all out. And I don't know. And then the

Vivian (58:32.006)
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And again, I would say, you really have to take what you see and test it before you scale it out.

Niklas Buschner (58:48.277)
Hmm. That's a great ending for the podcast. Vivian, I appreciate your time a lot and all the insights you shared. If people want to follow around, so there's a lot of great content from you already on the web. People can check that out if they want to dive deeper into all kinds of stuff. I think you did a webinar with Arabs, for example, which was very cool. And other than that, what's the best place to follow?

Vivian (59:11.632)
Yeah, thank you. You can find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there. I'm always happy to connect. And yeah, it was really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Niklas Buschner (59:21.503)
Thank you so much for taking the time and hope to catch up soon. Thanks, bye bye.

Vivian (59:24.477)
Yeah, thanks. Bye.