AI is changing how people find answers, and social listening gives you the raw material to meet them there.
The shift toward answer engine optimization (AEO) has marketers rethinking how their content gets discovered. When users ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview for recommendations, the sources that get cited aren’t random. They’re pulled from content that addresses real questions. That’s where social listening becomes your competitive advantage.
In the recent Webflow webinar How to fuel AEO authority with earned media insights, three experts broke down how to convert community conversations into answer engine optimized content. Grace Close, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Reddit, shared how brands can authentically participate in communities. Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, explained how to filter earned media signals from noise. Vivian Hoang, SEO Lead at Webflow, revealed how the team used Reddit-sourced questions to drive new citations.
Here’s what you can apply to your own AEO strategy.
Listen before you participate
Understanding community intent shapes the answers you create on-site
Before jumping into Reddit threads or any community platform, you need to understand what’s being discussed and why. Grace Close emphasizes that brands should approach community participation like entering a conversation already in progress.
“Listen first,” Close advises. She recommends that once you’ve set up a brand username with Reddit Pro, “go in and start tracking the keywords related to your brand, your industry, and that keyword tracking will give you a list of the top communities where that topic is being talked about.”
This listening-first approach does more than inform your engagement strategy. It surfaces the exact questions, pain points, and language your audience uses, which becomes the foundation for AEO-ready content.
How to build your listening workflow:
- Track brand and industry keywords using Reddit Pro or a third-party social listening tool to identify where relevant conversations happen.
- Document recurring questions and the specific phrasing people use when describing problems.
- Note competitor mentions and the context around why they’re being discussed.
- Identify intent patterns — are people researching, troubleshooting, or comparing options?
If you’re a designer, developer, or marketer building with Webflow, this means monitoring subreddits, such as r/webdev, r/webdesign, and r/nocode, to understand what questions prospects ask before they land on your site.
The questions you capture become your content roadmap for optimizing content for answer engines.
Prioritize what AI cites
Citations are your signal — ignore everything else
Not all earned media matters equally for AEO. Ethan Smith offers a clear filter: “You only care about what’s being cited. You don’t care about what’s not being cited.”
This means tracking the specific prompts you want to win, then auditing which sources appear in AI-generated answers. If Reddit threads show up consistently, Reddit matters. If YouTube videos get cited for your category, that’s where you focus. The signal is what gets cited. Everything else is noise.
How to identify what matters for your AEO strategy:
- List the prompts you want to rank for — think about questions, such as “best website builder for agencies” or “how to build a portfolio site”
- Run those prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overview
- Document which sources get cited for each prompt
- Track patterns across multiple queries to identify which platforms and content types appear most frequently
- Focus your content and off-site efforts on the sources that influence AI outputs
Smith notes that logged-in ChatGPT results differ from logged-out results, so test both. Most tracking tools use logged-out data, but your users may be logged in.
For Webflow users, this approach helps you understand whether to prioritize help documentation, feature pages, comparison content, or community engagement based on what AI systems reference when answering questions about your product category.
Structure answers for AI extractability
Turn community questions into on-site content that gets cited
Once you know what questions your audience asks and which sources AI systems cite, the next step is creating content that answers those questions directly. Vivian Hoang describes how Webflow used Reddit-sourced questions to create FAQ sections optimized for AI extractability.
“We added these FAQ sections to six of our core feature pages, and within a couple of weeks, we saw over 330 new citations, which were 57% of all total new citations, just to those specific pages.”
The approach matters as much as the content itself. “The key here is really to match the format with the intent behind the question,” Hoang explains. A troubleshooting question might need help documentation. A comparison question might need a dedicated page. A conceptual question might fit better in a blog post.
How to structure your pages for AEO:
- Add FAQ sections to high-value pages, such as feature pages, product pages, and landing pages
- Use the exact language your audience uses when phrasing questions — don’t corporate-speak it
- Answer directly in the first sentence, then expand with supporting detail
- Structure content with clear headings that match how people phrase their queries
- Include specific details, metrics, and examples that demonstrate expertise
For agencies and freelancers using Webflow, this means reviewing your service pages, case studies, and portfolio sections. Are you answering the questions prospects ask? Or are you writing for search engines from 2015?
Webflow’s CMS and component-based structure make it easy to add FAQ sections across multiple pages without building from scratch. You can create a reusable FAQ component, populate it with questions sourced from your listening efforts, and deploy it where it makes sense.
Put social listening to work for your AEO strategy
The connection between social listening and AEO is direct: Communities surface real questions, citations tell you which sources matter, and structured content captures the opportunity.
Start by listening to where your audience talks about problems you solve. Filter your efforts based on what AI systems cite. Then create content that answers those questions clearly in formats that match user intent.
Webflow gives you the flexibility to publish and iterate on this content quickly. With visual development, you can add FAQ sections to feature pages, create comparison content, and update help documentation without waiting on engineering resources. That speed matters when you’re responding to what communities are currently discussing.
How to fuel AEO authority with earned media insights
In this webinar, leaders from Reddit, Graphite, and Webflow discuss how to authentically engage on community forums and capture insights from earned media sources that you can incorporate into your website strategy to improve AEO visibility.
