Web Surfing in the Artificial Intelligence Era

Webflow is an AI-native Website Experience Platform that empowers teams to visually build, manage, and optimize websites that offer both the consumer experience customers expect and the enterprise-grade performance and scale they need. Webflow aims to give users full control over their websites without reliance on engineering, with big-name customers including NCR, Dropbox, Spotify and DocuSign.

Linda Tong, the CEO of Webflow, explains why she sees the web actively splitting into two versions - one for us and one for AI bots, and how companies are adapting and will continue to adapt to maintain traffic to their websites. Linda speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg
BusinessWeek with Carol Masser and Tim Stenovek on Bloomberg Radio.
The question a lot of people have now is, Okay,
how do websites need to change in the era of
AI so that they get attention of the lms that
are increasingly being trained on them and also sending traffic

(00:24):
to them.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
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 one hundred and twenty million dollars Series
C round from investors including y Combinator, Excel, and Capital g.
Customers include Dropbox, Spotify, DocuSign, and Moretim.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
We're joined by Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow. She joins
us from Las Vegas. Linda, good to have you with
us on the program. You know, Carol mentioned some of
the customers Dropblock, Spotify, docu sign and more. In the
era of AI. How does a website need to be different?

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh my goodness, so one, thank you for having me here.
I'm so excited to chat with you. About this UH
and two, so talking about how does the website need
to be different in the air 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 indexible for these new llms that are really

(01:23):
driving the future of sarvice?

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Is this the new SEO?

Speaker 3 (01:26):
It is and and a lot of folks are now
calling it AEO. So answer engine optimization.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
There, especially in search engine optimistic.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yesh, sorry search engine optimisation, especially in the early view
but in like the early oughts, like the UH, you know,
twenty ten, eleven, twelve, these websites that were just built
for you know, to I worked, I worked in this
a little bit early on. I pull this, You're okay,
and I was like, what are we doing?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
What are we doing?

Speaker 1 (02:02):
What are we doing? How is it good? 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.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
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 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 thely it's

(02:33):
sort of rejecting the slop, all the sort of marketing
like very like fluffy keywords, and 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 index and researched
and surface 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

(02:55):
see this evolution and 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.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
So how do you see this all kind of rolling
out these changes as we increasingly are asking llms our
chatbots to you know, figure out stuff for us.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
How does this roll out, Well, we're already seeing a
lot of it. One of the biggest changes that we've
seen at web Flow is in just the first six
months of this year. I guess now for eleven 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

(03:45):
versus traditional search engine or like organic traffic. And that's
gone anywhere from you know, fifteen to twenty five percent
of someone's top of funnel to now as much as
like fifty percent of your funnel is coming from these
these engines. And you know what this represents in terms
of growth is over one hundred and twenty five percent
growth in just the first six months of this year.
So the change is well underway. What is really interesting

(04:09):
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

(04:29):
on your site.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
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 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?

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Ultimately it's still to come into your website, but ultimately
it's the convert. Oftentimes you want to get someone of
your website to learn about you and then or you know,
enter their email or buy something. And now with AEO,
they might come in 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

(05:14):
go straight to your buy button or straight to your
subscribe button. So it's a 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.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
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
right that kind of feeling of discovery and figuring it out?
And then are we losing some control when AI is

(05:50):
doing that for us and there is something on our
part that we've got to kind of teach it what
we want. And then I also still wonder if that
is still limiting then ultimately in that.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Search, absolutely it's a it's actually limiting for both the
user and for the brand that is trying to interact
with the user. You know, as a user, you're how
well you ask an answer engine. You know, whatever question
and or quer you have, the quality of your prompt
directly impacts the quality of the response that you get.

(06:22):
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, you know, how they
get the results that they're looking for.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Linda, So we are we going to ultimately see ads
in this world and just got about thirty second twenty
five seconds.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
I suspect we will. I suspect we will start to
see ads pop up. This is, you know, 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.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, totally, Hey, good stuff. I'll look forward to already
our next conversation. Let's know how things are going. Linda Tongue,
executive officer of Webflow, joining us from San Francisco, m