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You may have heard of the professional website builder Webflow. If not, would you Google it? Read the potential AI overview, or scroll past it? Ask ChatGPT for more information?
These are the kinds of questions that Webflow CEO Linda Tong has spent a lot of time considering—both for her own company and its many clients, which include big companies like Spotify, Monday, Dropbox, and The New York Times.
In a world where generative AI is changing the way people navigate the web, designing a company’s online presence is becoming more complex than ever. Companies have to consider both SEO and chatbot optimization—and even AI bot visitors.
Like many other site builders, Webflow now offers AI design tools, including integrations with companies like Adobe, Jasper, and Writer. It also allows companies to personalize their sites for different audiences with hundreds of generated iterations.
We spoke with Tong about designing an AI-first website, traffic trends of the future, and why bot-facing websites aren’t getting the attention they deserve.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How is AI changing how companies think about the function of their website when search is changing so much?
If you’re a marketer, you’re thinking about SEO right now, for two reasons. One, for their website, they used to only have to worry about SEO because there’s a funnel, there’s traffic, and [the goal is to] get as much of that traffic into my website, and then I want to convert them through the experiences that I own and operate.
Because of the change with the volume of people doing search with some sort of generative search engine…you’re now seeing a pretty big switch between search and AI. Because of that, if you carve up that traffic that you would have gotten from SEO, now, it’s a subset. It’s a percentage of it. And people are seeing anywhere from 15% to 30% of their traffic, that top-of-funnel traffic, drop off from search, and it’s shifting to generative AI solutions. And now they have to think about, how do I rank in that? How do I drive discovery through that?
The other thing we’re seeing is, it’s not all human traffic. A lot of the traffic is bots—it’s these AI bots. And I think there are different ways that bots should interact with websites than humans. Websites for you and me are created visually and experientially, and they’re personalized to us. For bots, they really are looking to pull information, understand site structure, and be able to consume assets. I fundamentally believe we are going to see a rise in the coming months, if not year, new formats in which websites need to show up, where you’re going to have to now have the one for humans and the one for bots.
The bot experience would look fundamentally different, and it’s going to have very different structures. The same way that the human ones have a robots.txt element that helps you ensure that you’re not getting DDoS [attacks] and scraped for unnecessary things, I think there’s going to be some sort of structure or format that we’re going to align on as a standard that will be structured for bots. That is going to be a really interesting innovation on the forefront, because right now, we’re trying to blend both in the existing website, which means you now need to make your data really easily accessible. You want to think about page structures and your site maps, and you want to think about the relevance of the content and the data. It’s forcing people to optimize their website for many, many audiences that are fundamentally different.
One thing that we hear from tech companies a lot is how they’re developing AI agents, and they want them to be able to book travel or help with shopping. And one of the big barriers to that is the agents being able to navigate different third-party websites. When you talk about making sites navigable to bots, is that something that companies are taking into consideration?
There’s how navigable is it for the bot to understand it, but how navigable is it such that, if you had to be abstracted and they wanted to interact with a component of your website through any of these solutions, how do you do that? Both of those are very top of mind. What we’re entering right now is not an all-or-nothing future. Now your customer experience is becoming wildly more complex than it’s ever been. Where it used to be, you search for something, you land on a website, and you do everything on that website. Now you might do that, or you might go through some sort of LLM search and then land on that website. Or you might go through the LLM and learn something and then directly go to a subset of that website to go action. Or it might actually extract a component of it, and you might actually action directly through that LLM and do a purchase, buy an item or something. Or there may be a completely new model that shows up, and there’s no guarantee what that experience is going to be. And so you can’t just say, I’m going to only do that. You have to support every single one. It’s a much more complex landscape right now than ever before.
Is chatbot optimization something that marketers have already started to figure out best practices around?
It’s still early days. Even our own team…has discovered some areas to fundamentally shift how we’re showing up. The top trends that I’m noticing are, one, the relevance and the recency of your content is big. So we refresh a lot of our content every week, so that it’s constantly holding relevance. The second thing is, there’s a weighting to the content that you create. So influencer- or user-generated content has a much higher weighting than everything else, especially if it’s not directly tied to your business. So Webflow blogging versus an influencer talking about Webflow has a fundamentally different weighting. So how you shift toward your social strategy and your communities and your presence on—honestly, it’s kind of wild to see the influence of something like a Reddit or a Quora—but your presence on those third-party systems that are seen as user influencers…are really important areas to invest in. What I’m seeing, though, is every time a new model comes out, you see weighting shift. And so there aren’t best practices that everyone should do, but there are certain areas that I would say have shown to be really influential in your rankings.
Are there any issues in AI web design that aren’t getting enough attention right now?
That [human-to-bot] shift that I was talking about, part of why it’s still really early is because I don’t think anyone is talking about humans versus bots on their websites. I personally believe this is going to be one of the biggest shifts that we are going to see that’s going to hit the entire marketing industry in the next—I think it’s the coming months, I don’t think it’s like years away. It is going to fundamentally transform how you think about your brand awareness, like the concept of, what does an AI-first website look like? It’s something that I don’t think anyone’s thinking about deeply, and I don’t expect them to, but that’s something I think about every morning and night before I go to bed.
There are standards to be created. There are best practices to unlock, and there’s going to be even more importance to those building blocks, that design system, the components, your information architecture, and how your data is managed and stored. Those are going to be the underlying core beliefs that are going to be leveraged in designing what is an AI-first website. I really think there’s going to be a massive trend around this. I think this is going to be the next thing. I don’t have all the answers right now, but this is the thing that is keeping me up every day.