Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg
Speaker 1: BusinessWeek with Carol Masser and Tim Stenovek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: The question a lot of people have now is, Okay,
Speaker 1: how do websites need to change in the era of
Speaker 1: AI so that they get attention of the lms that
Speaker 1: are increasingly being trained on them and also sending traffic
Speaker 1: to them.
Speaker 2: That's where Webflow comes in. I'm kind of looking forward
Speaker 2: to this question, this interview and understanding this. The company
Speaker 2: calls itself a quote AI native website experience platform. Most recently,
Speaker 2: it raised a one hundred and twenty million dollars Series
Speaker 2: C round from investors including y Combinator, Excel, and Capital g.
Speaker 2: Customers include Dropbox, Spotify, DocuSign, and Moretim.
Speaker 1: We're joined by Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow. She joins
Speaker 1: us from Las Vegas. Linda, good to have you with
Speaker 1: us on the program. You know, Carol mentioned some of
Speaker 1: the customers Dropblock, Spotify, docu sign and more. In the
Speaker 1: era of AI. How does a website need to be different?
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, so one, thank you for having me here.
Speaker 3: I'm so excited to chat with you. About this UH
Speaker 3: and two, so talking about how does the website need
Speaker 3: to be different in the air of AI. You now
Speaker 3: have to serve two audiences. You now have to build
Speaker 3: the traditional website that a human experiences and you have
Speaker 3: to build a website now that is AI readable and
Speaker 3: can be indexible for these new llms that are really
Speaker 3: driving the future of sarvice?
Speaker 1: Is this the new SEO?
Speaker 3: It is and and a lot of folks are now
Speaker 3: calling it AEO. So answer engine optimization.
Speaker 1: Well, we had a I wouldn't say SEO was great
Speaker 1: for you know, it wasn't. It wasn't necessarily all good
Speaker 1: all the time. There was a lot of garbage. Can
Speaker 1: I say that garbage out.
Speaker 2: There, especially in search engine optimistic.
Speaker 1: Yesh, sorry search engine optimisation, especially in the early view
Speaker 1: but in like the early oughts, like the UH, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty ten, eleven, twelve, these websites that were just built
Speaker 1: for you know, to I worked, I worked in this
Speaker 1: a little bit early on. I pull this, You're okay,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what are we doing?
Speaker 2: What are we doing?
Speaker 1: What are we doing? How is it good? How do
Speaker 1: you make sure that you were not creating slop that
Speaker 1: companies aren't creating slop that we're actually serving the end user.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. It's you know, I think the slot that you're
Speaker 3: talking about is with you know, early days of SEO,
Speaker 3: it was just shoving keywords in there and trying to
Speaker 3: like change headers so that you would index well and
Speaker 3: get to the top of a search result. What's different
Speaker 3: now with AEO is actually it's founded on authority and
Speaker 3: the richness of your content. So it's actually thely it's
Speaker 3: sort of rejecting the slop, all the sort of marketing
Speaker 3: like very like fluffy keywords, and instead it's saying the
Speaker 3: content on your site, the structure of your site has
Speaker 3: to be designed to be authoritative, and you have to
Speaker 3: have detailed information that ultimately will get index and researched
Speaker 3: and surface back into an answer if you go you
Speaker 3: know search, you know, ask a question to any of
Speaker 3: these engines. And so I actually think you're going to
Speaker 3: see this evolution and how you design a site to
Speaker 3: be more authoritative and to provide meaningful value to users
Speaker 3: in order to rank or surface as a result through
Speaker 3: these different llms.
Speaker 2: So how do you see this all kind of rolling
Speaker 2: out these changes as we increasingly are asking llms our
Speaker 2: chatbots to you know, figure out stuff for us.
Speaker 3: How does this roll out, Well, we're already seeing a
Speaker 3: lot of it. One of the biggest changes that we've
Speaker 3: seen at web Flow is in just the first six
Speaker 3: months of this year. I guess now for eleven months,
Speaker 3: but as this year has been evolving, we've seen a
Speaker 3: skyrocketing of the amount of traffic that's coming in in
Speaker 3: terms of top of funnel from these llms. So we
Speaker 3: think of it as traffic that's coming from these agents
Speaker 3: versus traditional search engine or like organic traffic. And that's
Speaker 3: gone anywhere from you know, fifteen to twenty five percent
Speaker 3: of someone's top of funnel to now as much as
Speaker 3: like fifty percent of your funnel is coming from these
Speaker 3: these engines. And you know what this represents in terms
Speaker 3: of growth is over one hundred and twenty five percent
Speaker 3: growth in just the first six months of this year.
Speaker 3: So the change is well underway. What is really interesting
Speaker 3: about the patterns are it's changing the funnel itself. You know,
Speaker 3: with SEO, it was about discovery, it was about getting
Speaker 3: someone to click through and get to your website. With AEO,
Speaker 3: it's about building context. So when a user comes in
Speaker 3: through this answer Engine, they're coming in with higher intent
Speaker 3: and higher willingness to ultimately engage and interact and convert
Speaker 3: on your site.
Speaker 1: The incentive in SEO was to get people to go
Speaker 1: to your website. You get that traffic. If you're a
Speaker 1: news site, you know, then you can sell that against ads.
Speaker 1: What's the what is the motivation? What is the what
Speaker 1: is what is the thing that makes it? So? With
Speaker 1: Answer Engine Optimization with AEO, companies want their websites to
Speaker 1: be featured. What's the motivation?
Speaker 3: Ultimately it's still to come into your website, but ultimately
Speaker 3: it's the convert. Oftentimes you want to get someone of
Speaker 3: your website to learn about you and then or you know,
Speaker 3: enter their email or buy something. And now with AEO,
Speaker 3: they might come in instead of having to spend time
Speaker 3: on your site to figure out who you are and
Speaker 3: what you do, they're coming in with so much context
Speaker 3: that they got from this answer engine that they might
Speaker 3: go straight to your buy button or straight to your
Speaker 3: subscribe button. So it's a it's a really it's a
Speaker 3: much more transactional, high context interaction and you're still going
Speaker 3: through the website, but it just it shrinks your funnel.
Speaker 3: The way it used to be, Linda.
Speaker 2: Though, you know one thing I'm curious though with AEO,
Speaker 2: I mean, does a user lose some control like as
Speaker 2: you said with SEO, like we had some control about
Speaker 2: kind of filtering through where did we want to go
Speaker 2: right that kind of feeling of discovery and figuring it out?
Speaker 2: And then are we losing some control when AI is
Speaker 2: doing that for us and there is something on our
Speaker 2: part that we've got to kind of teach it what
Speaker 2: we want. And then I also still wonder if that
Speaker 2: is still limiting then ultimately in that.
Speaker 3: Search, absolutely it's a it's actually limiting for both the
Speaker 3: user and for the brand that is trying to interact
Speaker 3: with the user. You know, as a user, you're how
Speaker 3: well you ask an answer engine. You know, whatever question
Speaker 3: and or quer you have, the quality of your prompt
Speaker 3: directly impacts the quality of the response that you get.
Speaker 3: And so there is a bit of a learning process
Speaker 3: that I'm seeing going on in terms of how people
Speaker 3: search or even have queries or ask questions in this
Speaker 3: new world that will directly impact, you know, how they
Speaker 3: get the results that they're looking for.
Speaker 2: Linda, So we are we going to ultimately see ads
Speaker 2: in this world and just got about thirty second twenty
Speaker 2: five seconds.
Speaker 3: I suspect we will. I suspect we will start to
Speaker 3: see ads pop up. This is, you know, a massive
Speaker 3: think of SEO as a trillion dollar industry. I can't
Speaker 3: imagine a world where AEO does not take a percentage
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Hey, good stuff. I'll look forward to already
Speaker 2: our next conversation. Let's know how things are going. Linda Tongue,
Speaker 2: executive officer of Webflow, joining us from San Francisco, m