What is AEO and how does it differ from SEO?

AEO is answer engine optimisation, making sure ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI overviews mention you among the sources they build an answer from. SEO deals with your position in search results; AEO deals with whether a model mentions you at all. They share a foundation: clean code, speed, a comprehensible structure. On top of that, AEO puts weight on machine-readable text, structured data, and whether there is a demonstrable author behind the content.

Does Webflow handle AEO on its own?

The foundations, yes. Webflow generates semantic HTML, allows custom code for structured data, keeps a consistent structure through collection templates, and has native settings for titles, descriptions, Open Graph and the sitemap. Beyond that, in the spring of 2026 Webflow launched a separate tool, Webflow AEO, which measures citations in answer engines and suggests changes. For now it runs as a closed beta on the Enterprise plan.

How do I find out whether AI models cite me?

The simplest route is to ask them. Write down ten to fifteen queries you want to be visible for, put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini once a week, and note whether you appeared in the answer and in what context. If you want a more precise picture, it can be automated with a script that asks the same questions every day and stores the results. Customers on the Webflow Enterprise plan have a tool for this directly in the admin.

What structured data should I add to my site?

Start with FAQPage anywhere you have questions and answers: that is the biggest gain for the least work. Then Article on articles, Person on the author profile and Organization on the homepage. In Webflow, insert them through custom code at template level rather than page by page. It is set up once and applies to every item in the collection.

Is AEO only for large websites?

It is not. Text structure, structured data, interlinked articles and a visible author work the same on a personal portfolio as on a corporate site, and none of it depends on your plan. The separate Webflow AEO tool is limited to Enterprise for now, but the approach itself is not.

Where should I start if I have an hour?

Add a frequently asked questions section to your most visited page and give it FAQPage schema. A question-and-answer pair is the format models reach for first, and it is the one change whose effect shows within weeks rather than months.

AEO in Webflow

A share of the people who would once have searched on Google now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity straight away, or read the AI summary sitting above the search results. They get their answer in a single paragraph, with a handful of links to the sources the model drew on.

That changes what is actually at stake. In classic search the game is position: higher means more clicks, but even the tenth result exists. In a model's answer there is no second page. Either you are among the sources, or that person never learns you exist.

This discipline is called AEO — answer engine optimisation. Below is what I do about it on the sites I build, and why it is considerably easier on Webflow than elsewhere.

How AEO differs from SEO

They are not rivals, and one is certainly not a replacement for the other. AEO rests on well-executed technical SEO — it just adds things that classic optimisation does not pay much attention to.

Classic SEO

The goal is a position in the search results
You work with keywords, backlinks and the technical health of the site
Success is measured in rankings, clicks and impressions
Text is written to be skimmed by a person

AEO

The goal is to be among the sources a model builds its answer from
You work with content structure, structured data and source credibility
Success is measured by whether and how models mention you
Text is written so a finished answer can be lifted out of it

Why Webflow is a good foundation

Models do not invent your content, they read it off the page. The cleaner and more predictable the code they get, the more reliably they pull out what matters. This is exactly where Webflow has a head start: it generates semantic HTML, the heading hierarchy holds, and above all the structure is defined once at template level and applies to the whole collection.

Sites generated in a hurry by AI tools do not have this. Every page is its own creation, structured data is there on some pages and missing on others, and nobody knows how it will behave next time. On a site meant to decide whether a model mentions you, that unpredictability is a problem in itself.

Five things I do about it on every site

1. Write so the answer can be lifted out

Answer first, context second, detail last. One first-level heading per page, and lower-level headings used according to the structure of the text rather than how big they should look. Short paragraphs — a model takes individual paragraphs as answer candidates and skips over long blocks.

A frequently asked questions section is the most effective format you can put on a page. A question followed by an answer is exactly what a model is looking for.

2. Add structured data

Structured data is how you tell a page “this is an article, this is the author, this is a question and this is its answer”. Without it the model guesses from the text. With it, it knows.

FAQPage — anywhere you have questions and answers. In my experience the biggest gain for the least work.
Article — on articles, author and publication date included.
HowTo — on step-by-step guides.
Organization and Person — on the homepage and the author profile, so it is clear who stands behind the content.

In Webflow I handle this with custom code at template level, not on individual pages. It is set up once and applies to every item in the collection — and, more importantly, it cannot drift from what is actually visible on the page. I write about the technical side in more detail in the article on SEO in Webflow.

3. Build topic clusters, not isolated articles

Models do not judge a single page on its own; they judge how deeply you cover a topic. One article on a subject weighs less than a main article surrounded by several follow-ups that link to each other.

In Webflow this can be built without manual work — the connection between articles can be handled by a reference field in the collection, and the related-articles section is then generated by the template on its own.

4. Let the author be seen

Who wrote the content matters when it is being judged. Anonymous text loses to text signed by a specific person with demonstrable experience. That is why articles deserve a name, a role, a photo, Person schema and links to profiles where it can be verified that the person really does what they are writing about.

If several people write on the site, it makes sense to keep authors as their own collection and connect them to articles by reference. One setup that every article benefits from.

5. Check whether models actually cite you

Optimising blind is pointless. The simplest way to start today: write down ten to fifteen queries you want to be visible for, put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini once a week, and note whether you appeared in the answer.

After that it is a loop. Wherever you are missing, I look at why — there is no answer to that specific question, the structured data is absent, or the topic is covered too thinly. I fix it and check again a few weeks later.

Webflow AEO

In the spring of 2026 Webflow launched its own tool for this. It shows how often answer engines mention you and for which prompts, suggests specific changes and can carry them out, with a person approving anything before it is published. For now it runs as a closed beta for customers on the Enterprise plan.

You do not have to wait for it, though. All five steps above work on any plan and need nothing beyond access to the project. Webflow has also released a free course on the topic in Webflow University.

Where to start

If you only do one thing, do this: add a frequently asked questions section to your most visited pages and give it FAQPage schema. It is the smallest amount of work with the most visible effect, because a question-and-answer pair is precisely the format models reach for first.

The rest — text structure, topic clusters, the author and the measuring — is longer work, but it compounds. And if you are still choosing a platform, this is one of the reasons to look at Webflow.