Brand Is Back: Guy Yalif on Marketing in the Agent Era

**Guy Yalif** (0:02)
8% of our self-serve signups came from humans that had just been referred by LLMs, ignoring spikes in other traffic that we saw that probably came from LLMs. That was 8%. And that traffic, it was further down the funnel. It converted 6x, not 6%, six times better than our unbranded SEO traffic, which I think is the fair comparison.

**Wade Foster** (0:34)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to Agents of Scale, the show where I sit down with operators and builders that are turning AI from experiment into infrastructure. I am Wade Foster, I am your host, I am the co-founder, CEO at Zapier, and today's guest is Guy Yalif. He is the chief evangelist at Webflow. Now, Guy is one of the clearest thinkers that I know when it comes to optimizing your website for both humans and machines at the same time. And this is more important than ever. Today, we're getting into the emerging field of AEO or Answer Engine Optimization. And he shares why LM-referred traffic is converting six times better than traditional SEO traffic, how to think about brand governance when AI can spin up infinite content variations, and what the WebMCP spec out of Google means for the future of the web itself. Guy, welcome to Agents of Scale.

**Guy Yalif** (1:29)
Wade, thanks for having me. Great to talk with you again.

**Wade Foster** (1:31)
Yes, I am super excited to chat with you. You have been deep into AEO, GEO and whatever they're calling it this day. So this is going to be a super fun conversation. I want to kick it off. You've built your career on this premise that 98% of website traffic just doesn't convert. In 2026, though, there is a growing slice of traffic that is not a human. It's an AI, it's an agent, and they don't see the design of your site. They don't necessarily respond to emotional copy. They may not care about visual hierarchy.
How much of that 98% is not going to convert because it's not actually a human? It's something else. When are you making this?

**Guy Yalif** (2:11)
I think it's a great question, and I think our websites absolutely need to speak to humans with just as you said, emotionally evocative, engaging experiences and to machines, where I think the job really is about concisely, efficiently conveying meaning and structure of your content and site and functionality. Why? Because they are constantly trading off. What's the cost to crawl and engage you? And how good is what you're creating? You want to make this as cheap as possible. And so in terms of conversion, yes, maybe the machines don't convert. I actually, individually, not Webflow, very much believe there will be machine conversions for non-considered purchases. So not our typical B2B software, like if I'm going to go buy another case for this phone. Am I going to let an agent go fully consummate that transaction end to end? Yeah, at some point. Would I let it buy my CMS or automation software? No, no. But I want to learn. And so I do think the agents will be helping people move further through the funnel, just like our websites do. And we see it in the data. At Webflow last summer, 8% of our self-serve signups came from humans that had just been referred by LLMs, ignoring spikes in other traffic that we saw that probably came from LLMs. That was 8%.
And that traffic, it was further down the funnel. It converted six, not 6%, six times better than our unbranded SEO traffic, which I think is the fair comparison.
How does that land for you?

**Wade Foster** (3:38)
Okay, that's impressive. So 6X, the conversion from an LLM, why do you think that is? What's happening that is causing that traffic to convert so much more?

**Guy Yalif** (3:48)
It is not a blip, that number. Ahrefs and Semrosh found X to X, and literally every CMO have spoken to, and I speak to hundreds every quarter now, as I know you do too, said it is materially higher. Why?
Because the LLMs are useful. I know that's sort of obvious to say, but like they're useful enough that they are helping people discover brands, engage with brands, move further down the funnel. And so the traffic that's not showing up in some other way, that is now being diverted is the wrong word, but like going through the LLM, they have had some of that brand engagement and interaction, which is why I, on the LLM, before they come to you, which is part of why I think AEO is such an important part of building our brands and driving revenue to them.