In Webflow's recent webinar Rewriting the web: Strategy, structure, and thriving in the AI era, industry leaders Ethan Smith (CEO, Graphite), Lauren Pleydell-Pearce (Chief Creative Officer, PwC), Danielle Ross (Vice President, Digital Marketing, Vectra AI), and Niklas Mortensen (Chief Design Officer, DesignIt) shared their insights with Guy Yalif (Chief Evangelist, Webflow) on optimizing websites for AI search. Their consensus? SEO isn't dying, it's evolving into something more sophisticated: answer engine optimization (AEO).

As AI agents become increasingly sophisticated at crawling, understanding, and summarizing web content, businesses need to rethink how they structure and present information. The good news is that the fundamentals of creating useful, well-organized content remain as relevant as ever. The difference now is that you're optimizing for both human visitors and AI agents simultaneously.

Structure content for AI agents

Make your content easily digestible for both humans and machines

Danielle Ross, VP of Digital Marketing at Vectra AI, emphasizes that proper content structure is the foundation of AEO success. 

"We're ensuring that every page on the website is structured properly — we have H1, H2, H3s," she explains. This approach makes content more 'quotable' for AI crawlers while improving the user experience.

The key is formatting your content like an AI agent would present it. Danielle recommends structuring headings as questions and providing concise answers prefaced by phrases like "In summary." This mirrors how AI agents typically format their responses, making it easier for them to extract and present your information.

She also recommended these key approaches that are being implemented on Vectra AI’s website:

• Use question-based headings. Frame your H2 and H3 tags as questions your audience might ask.
• Lead with summaries. Start sections with clear, quotable statements that directly answer the question.
• Organize with bullet points. Break down complex information into scannable lists.
• Apply schema markup. Help AI agents understand your content's context and relationships. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this.
• Create FAQ sections. Address common queries in a format AI agents can easily parse.

Beyond basic formatting, consider creating comparison tables and structured data that make it simple for AI to understand relationships between concepts. Danielle notes that her team also focuses on creating original research reports with data that can be easily cited — content that provides unique value AI agents can't find elsewhere.

Develop dual content strategies

Balance earned media with owned content for comprehensive AEO coverage

Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, reveals a critical insight about AI search behavior: different types of queries require different content strategies. Publishers dominate broad, upper funnel 'best-of' queries (earned media), while product sites can win niche, lower funnel, follow-up questions (owned media).

This dual approach recognizes that AI agents pull information from various sources depending on the query type. For broad, evaluative questions like "What's the best CRM software?"AI increasingly references third-parties like Reddit, Forbes, or industry publications. But for specific feature questions like "Which mid-market CRM has Korean language support?", your owned content can dominate.

Ethan's research shows that Reddit appears as the third most visible domain in Google’s US search results (behind only Amazon and Wikipedia), making earned media strategies increasingly important. 

Ethan and Guy agreed that AEO builds on what SEO should have always been: high quality content that answers prospect questions. While there are important differences, AEO and SEO are not radically far apart from each other.

However, as Danielle points out, Reddit requires authenticity: "You can't be really talking about your company, even if it's sort of pitched as educational." Instead, encourage technical employees to provide helpful, genuine responses in relevant communities.

To grow your brand visibility, develop a robust AEO strategy that focuses on both earned media and owned content strategies.

Learn more about using AI to drive marketing team efficiency in our free ebook.

Maintain human creativity

Use AI tools to accelerate ideation while preserving brand authenticity

While AI can accelerate content creation, Lauren Pleydell-Pearce (Chief Creative Officer, PwC) and Niklas Mortensen (Chief Design Officer, DesignIt) agree that human taste remains irreplaceable. 

"AI doesn't make you more creative. It makes you faster at being whoever you already are," Niklas observes.

The most successful teams use AI as a creative companion, enabling rapid exploration, provoking new thinking, and making abstract ideas feel emotionally real, earlier in the process. AI can help in generating concepts, testing personas, and building narrative worlds while relying on human expertise for strategic decisions and brand consistency. Lauren describes using AI for "world building" that helps visualize future products and services before development, while maintaining human oversight for quality and relevance.

She notes, “Weaving in generative AI is unlocking something deeper in creative teams. It’s not just about speed. It’s about range. Emotional range. Format range. Conceptual range.”

Ethan Smith reinforces this balanced approach with practical advice: "Use AI to make content better, not cheaper." 

He recommends using AI for the first 80% of content creation (research, ideation, and structuring) while reserving the final 20% for human refinement and brand voice.

To effectively blend AI assistance with human creativity:

• Train AI on your brand voice. Upload existing content and style guides to maintain consistency.
• Use AI for divergent thinking. Generate non-obvious questions and explore new angles.
• Create custom GPTs. Develop specialized tools for persona auditing and message testing.
• Establish review processes. Build in checkpoints where humans evaluate AI output.
• Focus on strategic convergence. Let humans make the final decisions about what truly matters.

As Niklas advises: "Start small, think big, move fast, but most importantly, stay human." 

This philosophy acknowledges AI's power while recognizing that genuine human insight, empathy, and strategic thinking remain your competitive advantage.

Lauren encourages marketing leaders to empower teams to experiment, noting “Generative AI helps us build worlds, not just as static ideas, but as multi-sensory worlds of new brands, new experiences, or new services — moving faster from hypothesis to story to impact.”

Build your AI-optimized web presence with Webflow

The shift from traditional SEO to answer engine optimization is driven by a fundamental change in how audiences discover and engage with your content. Success requires structuring information for AI agents, developing both earned and owned content strategies, and maintaining the human creativity that sets your brand apart.

As these industry leaders demonstrate, optimizing websites for AI search is about evolving proven practices for a new era of discovery. The businesses that thrive will be those that create genuinely useful, well-structured content that serves both human readers and AI agents effectively.

Ready to implement these strategies? Webflow's visual website platform gives marketing teams the flexibility to rapidly test and optimize content structures for AEO success. From implementing proper content hierarchies to creating dynamic comparison pages, you can adapt your web presence for the AI era, development resources optional.

Watch the full webinar to discover more insights on answer engine optimization and thriving in the AI era, and see how leading brands are already transforming their digital strategies.