The Ultimate Guide to AEO and GEO: How to Get Traffic from AI

I'm bringing you the web's best guide to the most important new growth channel

AEO and GEO together represent the most important growth channel since SEO. Every product builder needs to know them well.

Webflow generates >10% of its signups from AEO + GEO. And those signups convert 6x better than SEO traffic.

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Introducing Josh Grant

So I brought in Josh Grant, VP of Growth at Webflow.

He’s also a partner at Hypergrowth Partners. And, he’s launched an awesome Substack.

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Today’s Post

Together, we’re breaking down the ultimate AEO + GEO playbook – what Webflow is doing, the results they’re seeing, and the exact tactics you can steal and run this week.

1. Just How Important are AEO and GEO, Actually?

2. How to Optimize AEO + GEO: Step-by-Step

3. How to Set Up Your AEO + GEO Team

4. How to Measure Your AEO + GEO

5. 3 S-Tier Tactics To Steal

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1. Just How Important are AEO and GEO Really?

AEO + GEO are a new distribution layer, a new growth channel:

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on getting content featured as direct answers in search snippets

• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) aims to have content used and cited in comprehensive AI-generated summaries and responses

Let’s look at the numbers at Webflow, because they tell the story.

• Last quarter, 10% of all Webflow signups now come from AI search

• ChatGPT traffic converts 6x higher than Google: 24% conversion rate vs. 4% non brand search

• Of all LLM referrals, 91% come from ChatGPT, with Perplexity (4%), Copilot (2%), Gemini (2%), and Claude (1%) trailing behind.

• Two-thirds of AI-referred users convert within 7 days…they’re deep in-funnel and ready to buy.

• Combined, SEO Non-Brand + AI Search make up 19% of all signups and are growing 17% YoY, among our fastest-growing channels.

Clearly, it’s one of the most important growth channels out there. The game just changed from SEO to SEO + AEO + GEO.

For everyone from small business owners to big businesses.

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2. How to Optimize AEO and GEO

Optimizing for AEO and GEO starts with a mindset shift.

Traditional SEO was about ranking for keywords. AEO and GEO are about being understood, trusted, and reused by large language models.

This requires clarity, completeness, and credibility:

Webflow treats AEO and GEO as a living system.

Every page, schema, and update is designed to help AI models understand who Webflow is, what Webflow offers, and why Webflow is credible.

It’s a constant feedback loop between what users are asking, what models are surfacing, and what converts.

Here’s how build that yourself in 6 steps.

Step 1: Assess where you stand right now

Before you optimize anything, you need to know where you are.

Most companies assume their SEO is solid, so AEO and GEO will just work. That’s wrong. AI search engines evaluate you on different signals, and traditional SEO health doesn’t predict AEO + GEO performance.

Josh and I built a diagnostic framework that scores your readiness across three pillars: SEO, AEO, and GEO.

Go through each column and check what applies to your site right now. Be honest. If your content hasn’t been updated in 90+ days, mark it. If you have no FAQ schema anywhere, mark it. If ChatGPT never cites you, mark it.

Your total score tells you where to focus:

• 13-15: You’re ahead of most companies. Focus on expanding to adjacent topics and publishing original research monthly. Maintain your 30-day refresh cadence.

• 10-12: You have a solid foundation. Map your competitors’ content gaps, add schema to your remaining pages, refresh your top 20 pages monthly, and launch citation tracking.

• 6-9: You’re in the building phase. Focus on your top 10 pages only. Deploy FAQ schema this week. Set up Profound tracking. Commit to a 90-day sprint.

• 0-5: AI doesn’t know you exist yet. Audit your current schema (probably zero). Add Article + FAQ to 5 pages. Mine 50 questions from Reddit. Establish weekly measurement.

The companies winning at AEO and GEO didn’t start with perfect scores. They started with honest assessments and systematic improvements. Webflow’s score 18 months ago would have been a 7 on each. Today they’re at 13+ and growing.

That gap represents 10% of their total signups and a 6x higher conversion rate than traditional search traffic.

Step 2: Structure your content for models, not just crawlers

Search crawlers can piece together messy structure. Models can’t. They rely on clean markup, logical headings, and schema to interpret meaning.

Make sure every major page has consistent metadata, FAQs, and schema markup that clearly defines what the page covers. This makes content easier for LLMs to reuse in direct answers.

Example: Webflow added FAQ schema to six of our biggest feature pages (Design, CMS, SEO, Interactions, Shared Libraries, and Hosting). Each page now mirrors how people naturally ask questions about those topics.

The result: a 24% increase in SEO impressions and more than 300 new citations from ChatGPT and other answer engines.

It’s 2025 (almost 2026) and FAQ pages are cooler than ever.

Step 3: Feed your strategy with real user intent

In the rest of this paid deep dive, we’re going to share how to build your strategy, how to set up your team, how to measure success, and 3 s-tier tactics to steal from Webflow.