What Practitioners Can Do Right Now to Move the Needle on AEO

This article is based on insights from Webflow’s "Building for AEO: Ownership, Agencies, and Execution" webinar, where real practitioners—including myself—shared hands-on experience with AEO in the Webflow ecosystem. Vivian Hong (Webflow), Alli Vogle (Flexi), and Juan Felipe Balderama (Astropay) joined Marissa Kraus to dig into what’s actually working. If you want to dive deeper, you can find the full recording and research report at webflow.com.

Start with an SEO Audit Before Anything Else

Everyone on the panel agreed: AEO starts with solid SEO. If AI crawlers can’t easily read your Webflow site, your content won’t show up in AI-generated results—simple as that. Think of SEO and AEO as two tracks running together, not separate strategies.

The audit doesn't need to be elaborate. Look for:

• Broken or missing heading structure
• Missing or incomplete schema markup
• Pages that load slowly due to video hosting choices or bloated assets
• Internal terminology that doesn't match how your audience searches

Webflow’s built-in AEO Readiness tool is your friend here. Run it on your project and fix the issues it flags before doing anything else. This step saves a ton of headaches later.

Three more items worth adding to that audit:

Meta descriptions are one of the first things AI search tools check when deciding whether to cite a page. Most sites have them written as marketing copy. That's the wrong format for AI. A meta description written for AI search opens with a direct factual statement about what the page covers, not a hook or a question. The formula and before-and-after examples across eight industries are in this post.

Title tags follow the same logic. Lead with the specific topic. Skip the brand tagline at the front. AI engines read the title to confirm what a page is about, and a vague title means the page gets passed over.

Alt text on images is crawlable content. Blank alt fields are missed opportunities. Write alt text that describes what's in the image plainly and specifically. If the image supports a key point on the page, the alt text should reflect that.

In Webflow, you’ll find meta descriptions, title tags, and image alt text in the SEO settings for each page and CMS item. If you manage a big blog, try using the Webflow Claude connector. It can update all your meta descriptions in one go, which is a massive time-saver.

Make Your Content Machine-Readable

Your site now has two audiences. Humans arrive later in their decision process, already partially informed by AI, and want to confirm they're in the right place. AI crawlers don't scroll, watch animations, or trigger interactions. They read the code. If your most important content only loads after a JavaScript interaction, as far as the crawler is concerned, it may not exist at all.

Audit your most important pages for what a crawler sees versus what a human sees. They are probably not the same thing.

Beyond that:

• Use proper H1, H2, H3 hierarchy on every page. Don't skip levels
• Put your most important content directly under the H1, before the first scroll. That's where AI places the most weight
• Add a short TL;DR after your intro and before your first H2 on longer pages. It's one of the easiest wins available and AI pulls from it heavily
• Add schema markup to content types that warrant it: FAQs, articles, people, organizations
• Make sure your sitemap is current and submitted
• Check that AI crawlers aren't blocked in your robots.txt

One thing I love about Webflow is that it generates clean, semantic HTML out of the box. Other platforms usually need extra plugins or custom code for that, but with Webflow, you’re already ahead of the game.

Structure Your Content So AI Can Quote It

Page structure is where a lot of sites leave citations on the table. A few things worth applying directly, covered in more depth in this post on Flow TV's AEO season:

• Use question-based H2s and H3s. They match the way people phrase questions to AI, and the first sentence under each heading should answer the question directly. Don't build up to it
• Write every sentence like it could stand on its own. If a sentence only makes sense with what came before, AI may miss it or misread it. Self-contained sentences are the ones that get cited
• Don’t sleep on adding a table of contents to longer posts. When Webflow’s own team did this, they saw AI-referred traffic jump by more than 40% in just a month—without publishing any new content or redesigning the post. It’s one of the easiest wins I’ve seen firsthand

Write Content That Solves, Not Content That Performs

Juan Felipe Balderama of Astropay put it plainly: "We don't create content to rank. We create content to solve." That distinction matters in AEO because LLMs are not surfacing keyword matches. They are looking for the most complete, authoritative answer on a topic.

In practice, that means:

• Lead with the answer, not with context-setting
• Write for how your audience phrases questions, not how your organization describes itself internally
• Cover a topic with enough depth that there's no reason for someone to look elsewhere
• Use clear, direct language. Vague prose doesn't survive AI synthesis well

Track Early Signals, Not Just Traffic

You won't get clean attribution on AI-driven results for a while. That's not a reason to wait before measuring anything.

High-maturity AEO teams track brand mention rates in AI-generated results, citation quality, and competitive displacement. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question your organization should be answering, do you show up? Do your competitors?

Test it manually on a regular cadence. Search for the questions your audience is asking. Look at the sources the AI cites. Note whether you're in them and who else is. That's a signal worth tracking even before it shows up in your analytics.

Distribute Your Authority Beyond the Website

AI systems are not only reading your website. Vivian Hong, who leads SEO and AEO at Webflow, made this explicit: they're synthesizing everything being said about your brand across publications, forums, social, video, and third-party sites.

That means:

• Consistent messaging across every channel, not just the site
• Active presence on the platforms your audience uses to talk about your industry
• Earned mentions in publications and communities that AI tools treat as credible sources

Your website is one signal in a larger network. The organizations showing up in AI results have built authority across multiple surfaces, not just a well-optimized homepage.

Own the Strategy Internally

The webinar data on agency partnerships is direct: 48% of marketing leaders are working with agencies on AEO, but only one in five practitioners say those partnerships are very effective. The gap is almost always a question of internal ownership.

Agencies work best when someone inside the organization owns the strategy: the audience definition, the content priorities, the KPIs, the roadmap. If that lives only with the agency, execution stalls when the relationship changes, the budget shifts, or the landscape moves.

Assign someone internally to own AEO. Give them the data access and the mandate. Then use agency support to accelerate what that person already has a point of view on.

This post draws on Webflow's "Building for AEO: Ownership, Agencies, and Execution" webinar. The panel included Vivian Hong (Webflow), Alli Vogle (Flexi), and Juan Felipe Balderama (Astropay), moderated by Marissa Kraus. The full recording and research report are at webflow.com.

If you're working through what this means for your Webflow site, let's talk.