How Webflow Built an AEO Assessment Tool in a Weekend

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Guy Yalif built the prototype of Webflow's AEO assessment tool in a weekend using AI. Now it's processing thousands of assessments every month and helping CMOs navigate a transformative reality: traffic from AI answer engines converts 6x better than traditional search, yet most marketers lack strategies to capture it.

This is what happens when AI transforms operators into creators. Someone with a good idea and domain expertise hacks together a workable prototype over a weekend, gets internal traction with actual users, and then productionizes with the team. It's a story that proves AI doesn't just make engineers more productive—it turns subject matter experts into builders who can solve their own problems at scale.

The Problem Worth Solving

"AEO started coming up in every conversation," Guy explains. As Webflow's Chief Evangelist, he spends his days talking with marketing leaders. Increasingly, they were all wrestling with the same challenge: how do you optimize for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude? Do LLM-specific tactics differ fundamentally from SEO strategies?

The stakes are higher than many realize. While organic traffic has dropped 10-25% for many companies with the rise of large language models, there's a silver lining: LLM-sourced traffic converts dramatically better. At Webflow, 8% of self-serve signups come from LLM traffic, and that traffic converts 6 times better than unbranded search. Industry data from Ahrefs and SEMrush confirms conversion rates are 4x to 23x higher.

The distinction matters. When someone arrives at your site from an AI answer engine, they've already had a conversation. They've asked longer questions (23 words on average versus 4 words in traditional search), refined their needs through back-and-forth dialogue, and done substantial research. They're further down the funnel and ready to convert.

Here's the complication: LLMs reformulate your carefully crafted brand messaging. They might reduce your positioning to a feature list, confidently get it wrong, or leave you out entirely. Traditional SEO showed your words unaltered in search results. AEO requires a different approach entirely.

The Solution: An Actionable Assessment Framework

The solution was an assessment tool where someone simply enters their domain name, and Webflow analyzes their site from the outside—crawling on-site and off-site presence across LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and elsewhere—then delivers a personalized assessment with their maturity level in each category and specific next steps.

Their comprehensive framework measures AEO maturity across four categories:

• Content: Moving from keywords to answering questions to ensuring relevance through personalization
• Technical: On-page SEO still matters, but now you're giving LLMs additional context through schema markup, sitemaps, and site speed
• Authority: Backlinks matter, but widespread mentions and engaging experiences matter more
• Measurement: You need to track mentions, share of voice, and sentiment rather than relying on keyword rankings

Within each category, they created five maturity levels—a rubric that CMOs could use to structure their team's progress and practitioners could use to identify what to tackle next. "There's an awful lot behind this," Guy notes. 

How It Was Built: A Weekend Prototype to Production Pipeline

Here's where the story gets interesting. Guy is the founder of four tech companies, and while he’s spent most of his time in CEO and marketing roles, is more technical than most. That being said, he describes this current work as "coding in English," and he built the first version over a weekend.

The V1 Process:

• Spent hours conversing with ChatGPT and Claude about how to structure the assessment
• Created a 600-line prompt document that instructed the LLM to crawl sites, analyze data, calculate metrics, and generate summaries
• Connected everything through Zapier (because "the amount of extra time it would have taken to figure out the API to Slack, the API to Marketo, to go access Google docs...that probably would have caused this to never happen")
• Auto-generated PDFs through Google Docs templates
• Made it available via both a web form and a Slack channel where sales team members could request assessments

The result? "It was genuinely useful to people," Guy says. So they kept iterating, and brought in engineers to take the project from prototype to production-grade.

What Production Looks Like Now:

• 87 pages of prompts (up from the original 600 lines)
• Multiple specialized assessors for content, technical, authority, and measurement categories
• An orchestrator that manages logic, determines if new analysis is needed, launches parallel assessments, and combines results
• Integration with Webflow CMS to populate custom pages for each assessment
• Connections to Marketo, Salesforce, Slack, and batch spreadsheet processing

Guy's transparency is refreshing: "When I started, I thought, hey, this is straightforward." The reality involved constant iteration—breaking apart prompts that produced "gobbledygook," connecting new data sources, and refining the logic of how pieces communicate and share memory.

The technical orchestration required genuine engineering skill. The core insight proves powerful: Guy could focus on value creation (the assessment logic) rather than delivery infrastructure, because tools like Zapier and Claude handled the connective tissue.

The Results: 3,500 Assessments and Counting

In just three months, the tool has run over 3,500 assessments. It's become a valuable tool in sales conversations and has helped elevate AEO fluency across the market.

Perhaps most tellingly, when Guy runs webflow.com through the assessment, Webflow scores a 3 out of 5. "It's in that middle range," he admits with a laugh. This serves as a reminder that AEO is early innings for everyone—and that's actually good news. Unlike SEO, where you claw tooth and nail to move up one rank, there's massive opportunity. For example, 73% of websites cited by Google on the top page have schema markup, while 88% of websites lack schema entirely.

How to Approach This at Your Organization

The Webflow AEO assessment story offers a blueprint for how organizations can embrace the "everyone becomes a builder" paradigm:

Start with a real problem you hear repeatedly. Guy didn't dream this up in isolation—AEO came up in every CMO conversation he had. Repeated pain points signal an opportunity worth exploring.

Build the scrappy MVP yourself. Guy's weekend prototype wasn't beautiful, though it worked. It proved useful enough that the sales team wanted to use it. That's your validation to keep going.

Use AI to bridge the skill gap. You can leverage domain expertise to build valuable tools through conversational AI development. Guy was "coding in English" and had conversations with LLMs about structure and approach. Technical comfort combined with subject matter knowledge enables prototypes that would have required engineering teams in the past.

Design for iteration from day one. Guy's V1 was 600 lines. The production version is 87 pages across multiple specialized agents. Plan for your initial idea to evolve substantially as you learn what users need.

Partner with specialists for productionization. Guy built the assessment logic, but Webflow's design team created the beautiful pages, marketing ops handled the form and Marketo integration, and engineers contributed real code where needed. Recognize where your expertise ends and collaborate effectively.

Measure real usage, not vanity metrics. 3,500 assessments in three months represents thousands of conversations with potential customers, each receiving personalized, actionable guidance. Focus on utility rather than just scale.

The Bigger Picture

Guy's closing advice is simple but profound: "The amount of time and resources this took compared to a year ago, two years ago? Unfathomable to be able to do this this quickly with this much."

This is the transformation AI enables: subject matter experts who understand a problem deeply can now build solutions themselves, test with real users, and iterate based on feedback—all before involving traditional engineering resources on something uncertain.

Engineers remain essential (Webflow's EPD team is "phenomenal" and "busy building the core product"), but AI unlocks a new category of internal tools, prototypes, and experiments that can be validated quickly and productionized strategically.

Every organization has operators with deep domain knowledge and ideas for tools that could help customers or internal teams. The question is whether you're giving them permission and support to build.

Want to check your own AEO maturity? 

Visit webflow.com/solutions/aeo to get a free assessment of your site.

Want to learn more about building AI tools that solve real problems? 

That's exactly what we explore at Alvex. We're helping teams understand how to turn operators into builders and ideas into production tools. Connect with us to continue the conversation.