How to Optimize Webflow Sites for AI Search

Let’s get some quick wins for optimizing your Webflow site, and also give you our rough playbook on how to maximize your top-performing pages.  AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini don’t just rank pages; they retrieve answers. This means the future of visibility is about retrievability, not rankings.

In this guide, we’ll show how to optimize your Webflow site for AI search, from quick settings to more advanced strategies, based on how New Chemistry optimizes Webflow sites for clients. Whether you manage a SaaS brand or a content-driven business, these steps will help ensure your content is visible, retrievable, and cited inside AI-generated results.

TLDR: 3 things every marketing leader should know:

Mentions matter. LLMs pull from brand citations across the web, not just backlinks. Audit where your name shows up (and where it doesn’t). Don’t obsess over this if your own website doesn’t have essential optimizations outlined below. 

Sentiment shapes recommendations. AI doesn’t just look at “yes/no” mentions; it evaluates how people talk about you. Positive framing = higher trust. Evaluate sentiment to see if there’s positioning you need to include in your structured data to overcome false information about your brand. 

Schema is your secret weapon. FAQ schema, JSON-LD, and structured data drastically increase AI visibility. This can be very uninteresting and tedious, but popular LLM’s literally tell us how to optimize our websites to more effectively train on the content. This should be the very first step for every marketing team looking to enhance their AI visibility. 

There are two primary ways to increase your visibility in AI search. 

• The first is increasing your mentions on review sites, Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, industry communities, etc. 
• The second way is to be cited as a source driven by your technical setup, expertly structured data, and consistently authoritative content. In my opinion, this is the far more sustainable and impactful approach because it focuses on what you personally own on the internet. 

Webflow Settings – Quick Wins 

Start with the foundational SEO settings that make your Webflow site machine-readable.

Many Webflow sites do not have these basics covered, and they are extremely easy to fix. 

1. Set your default domain to WWW – Ensures consistent URL indexing.
2. Turn off Webflow subdomain indexing – Prevents duplicate content from confusing AI crawlers.
3. Enable auto-generated sitemaps, robots.txt updates, and add LLMS.txt files – Helps LLMs discover content faster. If you need more direction on creating an LLMS.txt file, you can use a free tool like the one at SiteSpeak.

If you’re unfamiliar with llms.txt files, this is how Webflow describes their intentions in their knowledge base.

“Think of llms.txt as a proposed convention –– like an early sitemap –– but still experimental and not widely adopted. It’s a structured plain-text file that gives LLMs a curated overview of your site’s content and how you want it interpreted.

Unlike sitemaps (which guide search engine crawlers), the intent is to help LLMs reason about your content, better summarize it, and surface relevant information when users ask questions. However, note that the current impact is not proven.”

Webflow llms.txt Knowledge Base Article

4. Use meaningful meta titles (50–60 characters) and descriptive meta descriptions (150–160 characters) for every page.
5. Add Open Graph images and descriptive alt text to make visual elements discoverable in multimodal AI systems.
6. Compress and convert images to WEBP – faster load speeds improve crawl frequency and retrieval quality.

These steps alone strengthen your technical baseline; think of them as the equivalent of teaching LLM crawlers what your content is, and why it’s authoritative at a glance. 

Ongoing Best Practices – Publishing New Content

AI search engines parse chunks of content, not whole pages. That’s why your structure and markup matter more than ever. Drawing on New Chemistry’s generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies:

1. Use Semantic HTML5 Tags

Wrap your content in clear

2. Structure with H2/H3 Headers by Topic or Question

Each section should stand alone. Example: “How Our Product Automates Inventory Tracking” instead of “Features.”

3. Add FAQ Blocks with Schema

Create 3–5 natural language questions per product or feature page. Example: “Does this integrate with HubSpot?” → wrapped with FAQPage schema.

4. Use Descriptive Internal Linking

Replace “Learn More” with “See how New Chemistry improves Webflow site retrievability.”

5. Add TLDR or Key Takeaways Boxes

Summarize in 2–3 bullets—AI crawlers give disproportionate weight to condensed insight sections.

6. Vary Your Language for Semantic Breadth

Mix terms like “AI visibility,” “AI search optimization,” and “generative search ranking.” This helps LLMs understand your expertise surface area.

7. Use Alt Text and Captions for Images

Include phrases like “Webflow AI search schema example” to strengthen multimodal retrievability.

Enhance Top Pages – Where to Go Deeper

Some optimizations take longer but really pay off, especially for pages already performing well in organic SEO. There are many Schema tutorials online, and using a plugin like SchemaFlow can help speed things up. Here’s where to focus next:

1. Homepage – Implement Organization and Website schema to define your entity.
2. Blog Posts – Add Article schema and structured summaries. Include a “Key Takeaways” module at the top.
3. FAQ Page – Add FAQPage schema and test retrievability in ChatGPT or Perplexity.
4. Product or Services Pages – Add persona-based subpages like “AI Search Optimization for SaaS” or “AI Search Optimization for Webflow.” AI systems favor context-specific pages.
5. Schema-Wide Review – Implement structured data site-wide (JSON-LD format). Combine Organization, Website, and FAQPage schema types where relevant.

Bonus tip: Use the Webflow → Custom Code sections for adding schema markup, and validate using Google’s Rich Results Test.

Conclusion

Optimizing a Webflow site for AI search is no longer optional; it’s the next evolution of SEO. By combining solid Webflow technical settings, thoughtful content structure, and schema-driven retrievability, you’ll make your brand more visible in LLM-generated responses and answer engines.

At New Chemistry, we help B2B brands engineer their visibility across generative search platforms with custom AI visibility programs, audits, and training.

Need an AI Search Agency? newchemistry.ai

See how Webflow is optimizing for AI search: webflow.com/blog/inside-aeo-strategy

So when you are staring at your ever-growing optimization checklist… remember, your technical on-page optimizations that humans will never read aren’t wasted effort. It’s a value exchange. It’s the search builders telling content creators/brands, “you scratch our training data’s back, and we’ll scratch yours with brand visibility”.