Web Surfing in the Artificial Intelligence Era

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2:29Linda Tong:The question a lot of people have now is, OK, how do websites need to change in the era of AI so that they get attention of the LLMs that are increasingly being trained on them and also sending traffic to them? That's where Webflow comes in. I'm kind of looking forward to this question, this interview and understanding this. The company calls itself a, quote, AI native website experience platform. Most recently, it raised a$120 million Series C round from investors, including Y Combinator, Excel, and Capital G. Customers include Dropbox, Spotify, DocuSign, and more, Tim. We're joined by Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow.

3:02Linda Tong:She joins us from Las Vegas. Linda, good to have you with us on the program. You know, Carol mentioned some of the customers, Dropbox, Spotify, DocuSign, and more. In the era of AI, how does a website need to be different? Oh, my goodness. So one, thank you for having me here. I'm so excited to chat with you about this. And two, so talking about how does a website need to be different, in the era of AI, you now have to serve two audiences. You now have to build the traditional website that a human experiences, and you have to build a website now that is AI-readable and can be indexable for these new LLMs that are really driving the future of search.

3:38Linda Tong:Is this the new SEO? It is. And a lot of folks are now calling it AEO, so Answer Engine Optimization. well we had a i wouldn't say seo was great for you know it wasn't it wasn't necessarily all good all the time there was a lot of garbage can i say that garbage out there especially in my search engine optimization yeah sorry search engine optimization especially in the early review but in like the early aughts like the uh you know 2010 11 12 these websites that were just built for you know to i worked i worked in this a little bit early on i can disclosure. Okay. And I was like, what are we doing?

4:16What are we doing?

4:17Linda Tong:What are we doing? How is it good? Um, how do you make sure that you were not creating slop that companies aren't creating slop that we're actually serving the end user? Absolutely. It's, you know, I think the slot that you're talking about is with, you know, early days of SEO, it was just shoving keywords in there and trying to like change headers so that you would index well and get to the top of of a search result. What's different now with AEO is actually, it's founded on authority and the richness of your content. So it's actually, it's sort of rejecting the slop, all the sort of marketing, like very like fluffy keywords.

4:52And instead it's saying the content on your site, the structure of your site has to be designed to be authoritative. And you have to have detailed information that ultimately will get indexed and researched and surfaced back into an answer. If you go, you know, search, you know, ask a question to any of these engines. And so I actually think you're going to see this evolution in how you design a site to be more authoritative and to provide meaningful value to users in order to rank or surface as a result through these different LLMs. Hmm. So how do you see this all kind of rolling out, these changes, as we increasingly are asking LLMs or chatbots to, you know, figure out stuff for us?

5:36How does this roll out? Well, we're already seeing a lot of it. One of the biggest changes that we've seen at Webflow is in just the first six months of this year, I guess now first 11 months. But as this year has been evolving, we've seen a skyrocketing of the amount of traffic that's coming in in terms of top of funnel from these LLMs. So we think of it as traffic that's coming from these agents versus traditional search engine or like organic traffic. And that's gone anywhere from, you know, 15 to 25 percent of someone's top of funnel to now as much as like 50 percent of your funnel is coming from these these engines.

6:12And, you know, what this represents in terms of growth is over 125 percent growth in just the first six months of this year. So the change is well underway. What is really interesting about the patterns are it's changing the funnel itself. You know, with SEO, it was about discovery. It was about getting someone to click through and get to your website. with AEO, it's about building context. So when a user comes in through this answer engine, they're coming in with higher intent and higher willingness to ultimately engage and interact and convert on your site.

6:45Linda Tong:The incentive in SEO was to get people to go to your website. You get that traffic. If you're a news site, you know, then you can sell that against ads. What's the, what is the motivation? What is the, what is the, what is the thing that makes it so with answer engine optimization with AEO, companies want their websites to be featured. What's the motivation? Ultimately, it's still to come into your website, but ultimately it's to convert. Oftentimes you want to get someone to your website to learn about you and then sign up or, you know, enter their email or buy something. And now with AEO, they might come in and instead of having to spend time on your site to figure out who you are and what you do, they're coming in with so much context that they got from this answer engine that they might go straight to your buy button or straight to your subscribe button.

7:31So it's a really, it's a much more transactional, high context interaction. And you're still going through the website, but it just, it shrinks your funnel the way it used to be. Linda, though, you know, one thing I'm curious, though, with AEO, I mean, does a user lose some control? Like, as you said, with SEO, like we had some control about kind of filtering through, where did we want to go, That kind of feeling of discovery and figuring it out. And then are we losing some control when AI is doing that for us? And there is something on our part that we've got to kind of teach it what we want.

8:11And then I also still wonder if that is still limiting then ultimately in that search. Absolutely. It's actually limiting for both the user and for the brand that is trying to interact with the user. As a user, how well you ask an answer engine, whatever question or query you have, the quality of your prompt directly impacts the quality of the response that you get. And so there is a bit of a learning process that I'm seeing going on in terms of how people search or even have queries or ask questions in this new world that will directly impact how they get the results that they're looking for.

8:49Linda, are we going to ultimately see ads in this world and just got about 25 seconds? I suspect we will. I suspect we will start to see ads pop up. This is a massive, think of SEO as a trillion dollar industry. I can't imagine a world where AEO does not take a percentage of that. Yeah, totally. Hey, good stuff. I look forward to already our next conversation. Let's know how things are going. Linda Tong, she's Chief Executive Officer of Webflow, joining us from San Francisco.

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