Webflow says AI answer engines drive half its customers' traffic

Webflow reported that AI answer engines drive about half its customers' website visitors, up from roughly 10% a year ago, according to SaaStr.

That's a steep swing for a company whose templates power 18% of the top 2,000 websites, per SaaStr. It means the tools built to chase Google rankings are competing for a different kind of visibility: citations inside AI answer engines.

Webflow's response is a set of AEO agents that track how often a brand gets cited inside AI answer engines and generate brand-specific recommendations. Every change routes through a review-before-publish gate before it ships.

Customers who turned on Webflow's AI-assisted technical SEO auditing saw a 75% jump in organic traffic, per Webflow.

The supply side backs that up. Similarweb found AI Overviews appeared on 43% of Google searches, up from 15% a year ago, while other trackers put the figure closer to 48%, per TechCrunch.

Neither SaaStr nor TechCrunch says whether Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz have published their own AI-citation numbers, or whether SEO survives the relabel to answer-engine optimization.