Imagine waking up tomorrow to discover that someone, or something, has rewritten your brand’s story.

Not just anyone, but an AI engine, confidently yet incorrectly articulating your brand narrative to thousands of potential customers. The ultimate question isn't whether AI will tell your brand's story. It will. The ultimate question is: will you help write that story or let the machines do it for you?

For many marketers, this unsettling scenario isn't futuristic speculation. It's happening today. For years, marketing has carefully crafted every word on your website, every campaign message, every piece of content. This messaging served as the source of truth for your brand, showing up in search results as-is.

Now, Large Language Model (LLM) answer engines are rapidly becoming the gatekeepers to your message, your brand perception, and your digital traffic. Forrester found that 95% of B2B buyers plan on using generative AI in their buying process this year.

Today, we're giving you the roadmap to regain control of your brand narrative using Webflow's Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Maturity Model, a comprehensive framework to help marketers navigate this seismic shift in how brands are discovered.

This isn’t about following the hype, it’s about staying ahead of real change. AI is already transforming how buyers discover and evaluate brands. The question isn’t if you should adapt, but rather how fast can you act before others take the lead?

Three challenges AI search creates for marketers

AI is rewriting the rules of digital discovery. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, faster than any other product in history, reflecting users' demand for concise, helpful, and personalized answers. Zero-click searches now account for more than half of all queries, starving some brands of traffic. Answer engines are reimagining how buyers find information, and they’re creating three challenges for marketing leaders:

1. Loss of brand narrative control: AI models describe brands with generic descriptions that omit key differentiators you've spent years building. Worse, AI might confidently get things wrong about your brand, especially if you (or another site talking about you) have outdated or inconsistent content. Columbia University found that eight top models, including ChatGPT and Gemini, gave wrong answers to more than 60 percent of queries. LLMs are telling your story, and they're often getting it wrong.

2. Declining traffic: As users get their answers directly from AI, zero-click search volumes are growing. HubSpot, considered the gold standard of B2B blogs, saw traffic decline 36% in one month. Bain estimates overall SEO traffic has declined 15-25%. The silver lining? LLM visitors convert between 4.4x and 23x more than typical SEO traffic. Traffic is down, but it is more qualified.

3. A sea of sameness: When everyone draws inspiration from the same LLMs, we get predictable results: indistinguishable brands all claiming to be "the best," "the first," "the leader." Linkedin revealed that viewers correctly attributed B2B ads to the right brands only 19% of the time. How can AI tell our unique stories when we aren’t doing so ourselves?

Introducing the AEO Maturity Model

Webflow's AEO Maturity Model provides a framework broken out by four different categories, each containing five different levels to maturity.

Content: From keywords to personalized answers

At earlier maturity stages, shift from counting keywords in posts to developing complete answers to the real questions your prospects ask throughout their buying journey. Move from a collection of keywords to a cluster of questions.

Advanced strategies involve regularly updated content and comprehensive topic ownership, systematically covering subjects your prospects care about. At Webflow, we leaned into AI to accelerate our content refreshes and went from manually updating less than 50 articles per year to automatically optimizing dozens every month. Within days, we saw a 40% uplift in total organic traffic for updated content.

The endgame? Highly personalized content that speaks to distinct segments, accounts, and unique individuals while maintaining brand voice. NerdWallet exemplifies this approach, reporting 35% revenue growth despite 20% less traffic by focusing on expert answers.

Technical: From basic SEO to automated site structure to speed

The biggest technical shift is making your site more easily understandable to LLMs. This involves adding explicit structure to your site, especially using industry-standard schema.org markup. 

Real opportunity exists here since 88% of sites haven't implemented schema.org markup yet, ceding visibility to more optimized rivals. However, 73% of first-page Google results use schema.

As technical maturity progresses, sites become super-fast globally and automate their structure, supporting both LLM visibility and user experience. Rotten Tomatoes got this right and saw 25% higher click-through rates simply by adding structured data.

Authority: From backlinks to widespread, positive mentions

Traditional authority building has relied heavily on backlinks.

With AEO, your goal is to establish your brand as a definitive industry voice through genuinely valuable content. This means active engagement through podcasts, speaking engagements, and strategic presence on platforms AI systems prioritize such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube.

Advanced authority means your brand is consistently cited as an authoritative source across industry publications, your research influences industry conversations, and your expertise shortens sales cycles because prospects already trust your knowledge.

You’ve also started to tell visually engaging, emotionally evocative stories on your site, maximizing the impact of the traffic you do receive. This matters not only to create an emotional connection to your prospects but because 94% of first impressions are design related.

Measurement: From keyword ranking to share of voice

Traditional keyword rankings show where you already appear. With AEO, you should track your presence in AI-generated answers and associated sentiment.

Your end goal is to measure your share of voice against competitors for the clusters of questions you care about. The most sophisticated capabilities enable predictive decision-making, anticipating shifts in AI-driven behaviors and allocating resources for maximum advantage rather than reacting after competitors have captured opportunities.

The five levels of AEO maturity

To help assess your overall maturity in each of the categories outlined above, we've developed a five-level scale:

Level 1: Keywords 

Search strategy relies primarily on brand or main category keywords.

This foundational approach drives basic visibility where prospects already know you exist, but limits reach to users actively searching for your product category.

Level 2: Answers

Content begins focusing on answering typical prospect questions.

At this level, you're creating genuinely valuable, original content around clusters of questions, widening your reach into earlier buying stages when prospects are exploring problems and solutions.

Level 3: Structure 

Systematically creating answers and auto-generating AI-friendly site structure that helps LLMs understand the meaning of your content.

You're now owning entire topics and making it easy for LLMs to consume your website, moving beyond ad-hoc content to organized, structured expertise.

Level 4: Pillar 

Your brand becomes an acknowledged authority in your space.

At this advanced stage, you're attracting high-value links and regular AI citations, creating a compounding effect for visibility while owning your brand narrative as much as is possible.

Level 5: Authority 

Programmatic AEO and continuous adaptation to answer engine changes.

Your comprehensive content program personalizes for each segment, persona, use case, account, and unique individual, ensuring your brand maintains authority.

As the AEO landscape evolves, we’ll continue refining this model based on new industry learnings.

How Webflow accelerates your AEO journey

The opportunity is massive because it's still early. ChatGPT and other AI tools represent less than 2% of search share. And the threat and impact are both already material.

The brands that take action now will shape how they’re discovered, trusted, and chosen tomorrow.

As an AI-native Website Experience Platform, Webflow provides the technical foundation and capabilities to accelerate your AEO maturity:

• Content: Generate on-brand content with AI, and  personalize by segment, account, language, or unique individual.
• Technical: Make it easy for marketers by delivering high-performance websites powered by our global CDN, auto-generating LLM-friendly code and site structure, optimizing for mobile, and maintaining security without plugin vulnerabilities.
• Authority: Create the visually stunning, engaging experiences that establish thought leadership and build the compelling content that earns widespread recognition.‍
• Measurement: Access real-time analytics to understand visitor behavior, content consumption, and experiment results.

Take action: Assess your AEO maturity

The AEO Maturity Model is your framework to navigate the three challenges answer engines create. Use it to benchmark your current position, then build your plan to move forward. Because in this new world of AI-driven discovery, the choice, and the competitive advantage, is yours.

Start with a free AEO maturity assessment to see where your organization stands across all four categories. We’ll share specific recommendations to guide your team to the next level of maturity and take the first step toward controlling your brand's AI narrative.