At a Glance
- Webflow’s AEO Maturity Model gives you a structured way to adapt your site for AI search across four pillars: content, technical, authority, and measurement.
- You don’t need a “big bang” relaunch — most B2B SaaS and content-heavy firms can move one maturity level at a time, starting with a handful of high-intent pages.
- The real ROI isn’t rankings alone, but controlling how AI systems describe your brand, recommend you, and cite your content over the next 2–3 years.
Why AEO Is Suddenly a Board-Level Question
If you’re sitting on a creaky WordPress install, slow templates, and a backlog of “we’ll fix it after the rebrand,” AEO sounds like yet another thing marketing has to somehow absorb. The reality is: AI answers are already rewriting how buyers discover and shortlist vendors — regardless of whether you’re ready.
Webflow’s own State of the Web data shows over half of marketing leaders expect to optimise for AI-driven search by 2026, while traditional SEO traffic is already down 15–25% across industries. At the same time, studies suggest around 60% of AI answers misattribute or misrepresent brand information — which should worry any COO or Partner responsible for reputation.
For growth-stage B2B teams and mid-market service firms, the question behind the question isn’t “Should we care about AEO?” It’s “How do we modernise our stack, move to Webflow, and not create another three-year migration project we can’t properly resource?”
What Webflow’s AEO Model Actually Changes for You
Webflow has formalised AEO into four pillars — content, technical, authority, and measurement — and wrapped them in a maturity model so you can see where you stand and what to do next. This isn’t theory; it’s grounded in how large language models now evaluate and cite web content.
Content moves from “blog posts” to structured answers.
Webflow’s AEO guidance is clear: focus on pages that directly answer real prospect questions at scale, not just a long tail of disconnected posts. For a B2B SaaS marketer, that means building “answer hubs” around categories, comparisons, and use cases, and using Webflow CMS to give those answers consistent fields (definitions, use cases, proof) that LLMs can easily parse.
Technical foundations become non-negotiable, not “nice to have.”
On WordPress, performance, schema, and crawlability often depend on a fragile mix of plugins and agencies. Webflow bakes in semantic HTML, metadata, sitemaps, robots control, and even llms.txt so answer engines can more reliably consume your content. That’s critical when AI systems increasingly prefer fast, clean, machine-readable sources.
Authority shifts from link-building to holistic credibility.
Winning AEO isn’t just about links — it’s about being the most trustworthy, well-cited source in your niche. Both Webflow and Ahrefs emphasise that LLM citations concentrate on clear, evidence-backed pages with strong author and brand signals. For a firm with a heavy content engine, that means tightening author profiles, surfacing original data, and consolidating overlapping articles into authoritative, cornerstone resources.
How Underscore Would Phase This for You
The way to de-risk this isn’t a heroic rebuild; it’s to use the AEO Maturity Model as a sequencing tool. You use it to decide what gets fixed first, what can wait, and how Webflow can shoulder some of the operational load.
Start by upgrading 5–10 “AI-critical” pages, not your whole site.
We begin with the small set of URLs that shape how you’re described: category explainer, product overview, core service page, pricing, and your strongest comparison or “alternatives” pages. Each gets a Webflow layout designed as an answer hub — clear definitions, scannable structure, embedded proof, and a compact FAQ.
Use Webflow CMS to impose structure on messy content.
For teams with 100+ legacy blog posts, we don’t migrate everything blindly. We define CMS content types around the AEO pillars (definitions, playbooks, case studies, research), then selectively migrate and refactor your best assets into those models. Over time, the CMS becomes your AEO engine: every new piece ships in a format answer engines already understand.
Instrument for AEO, not just pageviews.
Finally, we align measurement with reality. That means pairing your usual analytics with AEO-specific monitoring: tracking brand and category queries, watching how AI tools reference your domain, and using AEO tooling to surface where your answers are starting to get cited or misquoted. The output isn’t a vanity score; it’s a prioritised backlog of pages to improve each quarter.
Where This Leaves You — and the Next Step
If you strip away the jargon, AEO on Webflow is simply a disciplined way to modernise your marketing site: focus on the pages that matter, rebuild them as structured answers, let the platform handle the technical plumbing, and deliberately grow your authority in the eyes of both humans and machines.
For a time-poor marketing leader or COO, that’s the real win: a roadmap you can defend in the boardroom, phase by phase, without betting the company on an all-or-nothing migration.
If you want to see what this looks like against your current site, the next step is straightforward: run your AEO readiness through Webflow’s framework, then map it to a phased Webflow rollout. That’s exactly what we cover in our Blueprint Strategy Session — a 60–90 minute working session to turn “AEO” from a buzzword into a concrete, prioritised plan for your team.
Sources
- AEO with Webflow – SEO is shifting. AEO is next.
- Announcing Webflow’s AEO Maturity Model
- How we’re optimizing for AI search at Webflow
- How to win AEO with content
- Winning AEO with authority
- Answer Engine Optimization: How to Win in AI-Powered Search – Ahrefs
- 15 AEO Tools That Will Help You Optimize for LLMs – Ahrefs
- How to Earn LLM Citations to Build Traffic & Authority – Ahrefs
