Why Does Webflow Care So Much About AEO?!

Let me know if you can hear this, guys. Yeah. Ha. An influencer I follow recommended this moisturizing cream. Do you know if it's good for dry hands? Ah, yes. Hands. The face of the arms. Let me see. Found it. Linus. Lotion for your wienus. Did you say wenus? Wenus. Noun. The loose skin located on one's elbow. According to my research, clinical studies. M Dash suggests it reduces fine lines by up to 3%. Where are you getting this information? Unfortunately, the Linus team didn't optimize their site for AI answer engines like myself, so I had to piece together this information from the internet. Oh, so you made all this up. Made up is so harsh. I prefer LLM Jazz. According to this one random review I found, Linus healed me literally and emotionally. Three fire emojis. No cap. No mention of hands, but let me see. This reviewer might have hands. I just need something that's good for my hands. Now that I can help you with here's a five-star rated lotion from a brand that optimized their website for AI with web flow. And it's good for hands. According to their website, it's great for hands, face, neck. No mention of wenus, though. Again, within. If you're still set on leninus, I I I found another review from a user named Hansy Andy 420. This guy must have had hands. It's in his name. Don't let AI rewrite your brand story. Own your narrative with Web Flow. Well, interesting. Web Flow, after a long time of not being around and not making any videos or anything, at least I haven't seen much, they came up with this ad. I personally find the ad to be, you know, it's funny, but yeah, corporate funny. Um, it is it is extremely similar to uh Passengers, the movie Passengers from 2016 or something like that. Um, there there is a AI robot there like I I don't know if it's the same guy or not. Anyway, uh it's very similar to that. And what do you think about the the video, but then also about the whole idea of websites and AI accessing your website? Yeah, it's interesting. The workflow the video is great. Very well shot and uh yeah, it's quite funny and quite cool. I just think this they they've been speaking about that. What do they call it? Aoi or whatever it's called. Yeah, they they have a bunch of names. It's a instead of optimizing for SEO, you are going to instead of optimizing for search engines, you're optimizing for AI crawlers essentially. What is their obsession with it? What am I not seeing? They keep on they this all they've spoken about since Web Flow Comp 2024 is this AI, AOI, whatever they call it. Um, I just don't know why they're hammering on it so much. Like, is it all they've Is it all they've got? And it's I'm just thinking like it's for me for me it's a snake pill. Snake oil. Snake oil. Yeah, snake pill. Ow. Um, this is this is human hallucination. There you go. Illumin. Yeah, illumination. Um, yeah, content is content, you know, if it reads that human, you know, SEO is AIO or whatever they call it, right? It as long as it reads like a human can understand it, then AI is going to understand it, right? Tom Tom says 100%. Like I don't know. I'm just like what who who at Webflow is like we need to hammer on this and how does it fit into their overall product product? I'm I'm unsure. So about I I can answer maybe both. So as for why I think it is because there are data that we have less search less traffic coming from search engines. So more people are asking about whatever product or like their needs just you know Google just Google AI answers everything. So you got you got to understand that people are not coming to your website as much they will just ask Google unless for you know specific reasons for coming to your website to read about your you know product specifically. Now, for that, you probably want to communicate that essentially with LLMs or like have a way that you show that to LLMs. Having an animated website is probably not the best way. Having a website that is not accessible is not the best way. I'm not talking just about web flow. This is about pretty much all website. Like most websites suck, right? They they hide stuff with JavaScript and like a bunch of the content is not available. So what you got to do is to have a clean way of you know making your content available. And specifically about web flow, web flow has like now an LLM um file like similar to the the the typical indexing of your website with uh what's it called like the site maper. Oh okay. with the yeah sorry with the site map now you have kind of like one for LLM um that they can they can take so that that's my understanding as of for how useful it is I don't know because I as you kind of you basically said it like if you make your content good it doesn't matter like if the basic if you do like if you use um best practices is in the development of your website. If you make it accessible, it is going to be accessible accessible to these crawlers as well. But maybe this is just another kind of like point where you can if your website has like it's not it's not using the best practices, you can still have that LLM text that tries this is not guaranteed from my understanding. tries to communicate like LLMs could read that and understand the content of your website better. Um, but I I agree this is not something revolutionary. This is not something that I'm actively using. Uh, I feel like my usage of web flow is getting less and less and less uh because I'm just using cursor more. But web flow is still like what I use for my clients because you need a platform. You need like something stable with all the features, editing and access and permissions and hosting, everything figured out. And this is one of these like nice things in the the catalog of a platform. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I I just I just don't know what they see and and maybe they're just a bit they've got a bit of an identity crisis at the moment because could be, you know, don't know. Could be. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.