The most forward-looking insight from the Berkeley Haas AI Conference didn't come from an AI company. It came from Rachel Wolin, CPO of Webflow, talking about how websites get discovered.
The Discovery Problem Is Being Rewritten
For twenty years, the playbook for getting your product in front of people has been: SEO, paid ads, social distribution. Build a website, optimize for Google, buy some ads, post on social media. Everyone knows this playbook. It works. It's also being disrupted right now.
The disruption: answer engines. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude a question, those tools don't just generate an answer from their training data — they read websites, synthesize information, and present a response. Your website might be the source of the answer without the user ever visiting your site.
Rachel put it plainly: "Traditionally, websites got discovered through search. They got discovered through ads. And now answer engines are really disrupting where their customers and potential prospects are coming from."
What Answer Engine Optimization Looks Like
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is exactly what it sounds like: optimizing your content so that AI answer engines cite, reference, and recommend your product when users ask relevant questions.
This is different from SEO in fundamental ways:
- **SEO optimizes for ranking.** AEO optimizes for being the answer.
- SEO is about keywords. AEO is about being the most authoritative, well-structured source on a topic.
- SEO drives clicks. AEO drives citations and recommendations — which may or may not result in a click, but build brand authority in a new distribution channel.
Rachel mentioned that 10+ companies have been funded in the answer engine optimization space in just the last six months. This is moving from theory to real investment.
Why This Matters for Product Builders
If you're building a product right now — whether it's a SaaS tool, a consumer app, or a portfolio site — your distribution strategy needs to account for how AI tools will surface your content.
Think about it: when a recruiter asks an AI "who are the best product managers building AI-native products?" or a customer asks "what's the best tool for X?" — the answer comes from somewhere. That somewhere is content on the internet that the model has been trained on or can access in real-time.
The builders who understand this early will have an enormous advantage. They'll create content that's structured for AI consumption, not just human consumption. They'll think about their digital presence as training data, not just a marketing funnel.
Webflow's Strategic Bet
Webflow is positioning themselves as thought leaders in this space, which makes strategic sense — they're a website platform, and the fundamental value of websites is shifting. If websites exist primarily as sources for answer engines rather than destinations for human visitors, that changes what you build and how you build it.
Rachel described it as a "leapfrog moment" — while competitors focus on AI-generated prototyping, Webflow is investing in the enterprise features (brand design systems, security, compliance) that make websites production-ready for this new era of AI-mediated discovery.
The Practical Takeaway
If you're building anything that needs to be found — a product, a personal brand, a business — start thinking about answer engine optimization now:
- **Be the definitive source.** Answer engines prefer comprehensive, authoritative content. Depth beats breadth.
- Structure your content clearly. Headers, bullet points, clear definitions — the same things that make content scannable for humans make it parseable for AI.
- Build in public. Blog posts, case studies, project documentation — every piece of publicly accessible content is potential training data for answer engines.
- Think about citations, not just clicks. When an AI tool recommends your product by name, that's a new form of distribution that doesn't show up in your analytics dashboard.
The SEO era rewarded websites that played the Google algorithm. The AEO era will reward products and people who are genuinely the best answer to a question. That's a subtle but massive shift — and it's happening now.