- 20 hours ago
For decades, websites were designed to inform and serve human visitors. Now, they must also work with AI agents that interpret content, guide decisions, and increasingly take action on behalf of users. Linda explores what it means to build for both humans and machines, and why agentic digital experiences will define the next generation of brand presence.
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TechTranscript
00:05all right good morning everyone how are you doing thanks for joining us so hi I'm Linda Tong and I
00:13am the CEO of Webflow we are an agentic web marketing platform that is powering the digital
00:18experiences for brands like sky UK Dyson car trawler so I'm really excited to be here to
00:25tell you about building for the agentic web and I want to tell you how we got started on this
00:29actually sometime last year I had a colleague ask me have you googled us lately and what she really
00:35meant was have I looked us up on chat GPT have I you know looked us up on on cloud
00:40or perplexity and
00:41saw what these answer engines are saying about our brand and I hadn't so I went and I looked and
00:47to
00:47be honest I was pretty disappointed we've been taking webflow through this transformation over
00:52the past three years shifting into the agentic web marketing platform and the results I saw were
00:57really disappointing they were old they were stale they're factually inaccurate and I was pretty
01:03upset because we did this to ourselves we hadn't properly built for the agentic web which is why
01:09I'm here today I want to tell you what that means so you don't have to go through the same
01:12experience
01:12I did so 30 years ago we all built the web for one audience for people every single thing we
01:21did how we
01:22designed how we write how we structure our sites it was built for humans it was built for human eyes
01:28human clicks human attention and that made sense because the web was built by humans for humans but
01:35now there are two audiences we have to think about there's something that's fundamental that has shifted
01:40the second audience these AI agents they're reading your site and they're interpreting your brand
01:45they're recommending you to your buyers or maybe not recommending you and this is all happening
01:51before a human might even experience you or hit your website or know your URL and that's a problem
01:57because now there's this important thing because you're moving to a new channel of discovery it's
02:03no longer just SEO you now have to think about the second path of how AI is driving discovery of
02:08your
02:09business something that most marketers don't know is that over half of the traffic that's hitting your site
02:15right now isn't human all right this is these are bots these are AI agents these are LLMs they're
02:22crawling your experience they're answering some question that's been asked and they're not coming
02:27to you so at Webflow we've seen over a hundred and twenty five percent increase in LLM traffic to
02:33websites on our platform alone in the past year this is only accelerating this is an incredibly important
02:40trend that you need to follow and the thing is that traffic it behaves totally differently it's not
02:45coming in and clicking on your CTAs it's not filling out a form it is reading your content it's
02:51synthesizing it and then it's creating an answer to users that may never come to your site this is
02:58a second audience and it's here right now what's really important to understand is we're seeing a lot
03:04of change I talked to a lot of CMOs every day and they've told me that they've seen traffic drop
03:09off
03:09because clicks aren't happening anymore so when people are doing searches on Google they've seen
03:14over a sixty percent difference in how many searches result in a click right sixty percent of them are
03:20now ending without a click that is quite terrifying right referral traffic from Google has dropped eight
03:25percent year-over-year when you switch into the AI mode right so AI overviews by Google that metric goes
03:31up to 93 percent so 93 out of a hundred searches are resulting in zero clicks that fundamentally shifts
03:40what your traffic funnel looks like instead of thinking about it as SEO versus aEO you need to
03:46recognize that you now have two funnels and before you get too terrified that all of your traffic has
03:50disappeared something to note is that when you do get AI referral traffic that traffic converts at over
03:56two and a half X the times of the traffic that you got before so it's really important to understand
04:02it as two different channels and so that's why we spend a lot of time talking about aEO not as
04:09a
04:09this or that but you need to think about SEO for traffic and aEO for intent because aEO is a
04:15fundamentally
04:16new channel that you need to build for and think about and actually optimize for and people aren't
04:22actually understanding how to do that because where SEO being on the second page for the was a death wish
04:28with aEO
04:29there is no second page you're either in the answer or you're not so you need to figure out how
04:35bots can
04:36understand you how LLMs can actually comprehend your brand and surface you accordingly and
04:42here's the other thing I think everyone here has used chat gpt or you know any other LLM and the
04:47thing is our default response
04:48is to trust the answer that comes in how many times you go back and verify that the results that
04:53you're
04:53getting are right not as often as we'd like and the reality is is if the bot gets your brand
04:59wrong
04:59that's what your buyer is seeing and they're misinterpreting your brand completely too and that
05:05becomes their new truth so you have to think about that and the other thing that's happening is we're
05:09seeing this trend where discovery is a brand new opportunity when it comes to AI search so over 43%
05:16of users are actually discovering new brands via AI which is a huge opportunity and over 49% of users
05:24are actually changing the brands that they use based on recommendations from AI so if you can properly
05:30think about AI aEO as a path forward to drive discovery you're in the money but if you can't and
05:36if you can't represent your brand properly this is a big risk to your business and now before you run
05:42away and decide that all you're going to focus on is SEO and AEO the thing is that's just discovery
05:48building for the agentic web is what happens beyond discovery you have to think about experience and so
05:54I want to rewind a little bit I want to talk about a really common experience that we all understand
05:59navigation I don't know how many people are visiting from out of town but when I visit new cities I
06:04love
06:04to go see some of the sites and two decades ago if I came to Paris I wanted to go
06:09see the Eiffel Tower
06:10I would have gone on MapQuest I know I'm dating myself but I would have gone on MapQuest or Google
06:14Maps
06:14and I would have printed out directions on how to get from here to the Eiffel Tower and I would
06:19have
06:19had to follow those directions specifically turn by turn and if there was a road that was closed or if
06:25there's an event in the way I'd just be lost I wouldn't have any other way to get there but
06:30today
06:30I can just pull out my phone and I can open Google Maps and I can get live navigation if
06:35I decide to veer off
06:36track and go to a coffee shop it'll automatically recalculate if I want to avoid traffic it'll live
06:42overlay traffic for me everything as I swerve and turn it's reacting to me that is a fundamentally
06:48different experience and that's something we expect but when I think about the web for some
06:53reason websites are still feeding us these static experiences really similar to MapQuest in 2010
07:00every website is built as a static experience that when a user shows up you don't act as if you
07:05know who
07:05they are you don't take any of the context of what they're doing and we're just pushing them
07:09through this constant customer journey that was built for everyone and optimized for no one and
07:14that's the problem with the web today and so for our thesis of what the future is it's the web
07:20is alive
07:20okay the website itself should be dynamic it should be treated as a series of components and building
07:28blocks that are constantly transforming as you interact with them that's what you have to think about
07:33because it's one you can't build a website ship it and call it a day you have to think of
07:38it as a system
07:39a system that knows where is the visitor in their journey it should update as they move through that
07:44journey and more importantly should be recalculating every time they click every time they do something
07:49and this is a technical reality that is ready today it is not a future state it is a today's
07:55state
07:56the first time a visitor who might come you know to webflow's website from an ai recommendation that
08:01you know maybe it was they searched for an enterprise cms they're going to get a contextual experience
08:07that's going to give them more discovery on a cms for a user who comes to our website today that
08:12has
08:12maybe seen our pricing page there four times they're going to get an urgent high intent call to action
08:17and then maybe an ai agent is coming to our site and it just wants to crawl information and synthesize
08:22data it's going to get markdown it's going to get structured data and faqs no extraneous content
08:28these are three different experiences for three different audiences that are fundamentally different
08:34all on one site running simultaneously that is a dynamic web experience and that is what every
08:40experience should become every single session that happens becomes a signal every single conversion
08:46or a lack of conversion should actually feed into a feedback loop and then more importantly the site
08:51itself should be continuously improving and healing with every single interaction without having to
08:56have a human in the loop that is building the living web and a living website becomes a growth
09:02engine that growth engine takes every interaction it teaches it something and it feeds it back and
09:07then more importantly every optimistic optimization that happens will compound it but on top of that if
09:14your website's alive if it's actually transforming and if it's doing all these things you really need to
09:18make sure that it is yours and what makes it yours is your brand os you need to make sure
09:24that your brand
09:25dna is fed into your website and then it's bringing that context that allows it to represent you your voice
09:30your content your positioning your stories and that brand os needs to be built directly into the system
09:37that actually instructs every agent on how to work and what to do and how to optimize without that context
09:42you have a generic experience with it every agent every optimization is personalized to you it's your
09:48brand dna through infinite expression so what should you do i've seen some people nodding along
09:55what should you do if you believe in the future of the agentic web well first you have to build
09:59for two
10:00audiences you have to think about discovery you have to think about your experience but let me give
10:04you really tactical action items that you can do over the next series of the year first audit your ai
10:10presence
10:10go do that chat gpt search i told you to do takes a couple of minutes you could actually do
10:14it right
10:14now second fix your content the highest roi you can get is actually creating structured content that's
10:22machine readable think about what questions should be answered and make sure they show up on your page
10:26don't bury them in a 2000 word blog post third change measurement right now with seo you're measuring
10:33traffic that doesn't work anymore you need to think about ai citations you need to be thinking about ai
10:38revenue and how that's converting based off the kind of referral traffic you're getting and then there's structural
10:44changes these are the hard ones but they're the ones that make a difference you need to think about how
10:48to define
10:48your brand os you need to codify this this is your content your voice your positioning your assets
10:53everything should be codified into a system that feeds your agents that is actually continuously iterating and
10:59optimizing your website and then the last probably the most intimidating you have to think about your tech stack
11:05does your tech stack have everything it needs to build for the agentic web does your cms is it readable
11:10is content accessible via api does personalization happen on the flyer do you have to rebuild your
11:15whole site do you have agents that can run in closed loop experiences to actually optimize and build with
11:20you if you don't you need to transform and speaking of transform i want to give you a little bit
11:26of
11:26urgency because over 20 years ago the people who recognized that search was important and seo was
11:32important they jumped on it early and they got massive growth advantages in 2010 the people who recognize a shift
11:38and form
11:39factor from web to mobile or desktop to mobile they got compounding growth based on building from mobile first we
11:45are in
11:45this window of change it lasts maybe 18 to 36 months it'll probably even more compressed right now if you
11:51don't act right now you may
11:53miss it the people who do act right now will get asymmetric advantages and their ability to grow their business
11:59process so the future of the web is alive this is not a static medium anymore it's dynamic it's
12:07intelligent and it's increasingly operating without a human in the loop this companies that design for
12:14this that think about this they are going to win in this next chapter of how do you build in
12:19a digital
12:19world and the ones who don't are going to be misrepresented on chat gbt and i hope that's not you
12:25that's not you everyone
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