Have you ever had a website and thought, 'I would really like to have an interactive app that drives better engagement with my target audience?'. If you are a marketer, you almost certainly have. But building one typically requires an internal developer or an agency, and a fair chunk of time and money. Webflow reckons it has changed with its new solution, App Gen. Here's how.
Rachel Wolan, Chief Product Officer at Webflow, argues that the website is still the front door of a business, but it's taking people longer to get there. She pitches that with Webflow's AI native digital experience platform, her firm are still trying to bring developer superpowers to everyone, but now there's a whole new set of tools. Two areas upon which the company is focused:
In terms of AEO, Wolan says answer engines value freshness and correctness. They need to be able to quickly understand a brand's content and they'll go deep into your site, including your blog, giving you the opportunity to provide structured content around your brand and its authoritative voice.
Webflow claims to offer a full AEO kit that creates the information needed for answer engines. There is a site-wide or page level audit capability that identifies missing AEO and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) elements. It also recommends improvements, auto generates and optimizes meta titles and descriptions, image alt tags, and schema markup.
And, at its recent conference, Webflow announced AI Analyze, a native analytics solution that helps brands understand how their content is performing, including what answer engines are driving traffic to your website.
According to Wolan, Webflow is also seeing brands trying to experiment more, creating different experiences that capture user intent in different ways, while safeguarding consistency and trust:
They don't just want to throw any experience out there, like a landing page or an app that doesn't match your brand, and that usually takes an agency, if you want to have a custom, bespoke experience.
A custom bespoke experience that is on brand and is discoverable are the key tenets behind Webflow's new App Gen experience with the intention that it should be accessible by anyone from the designer to the developer, to the content marketer Basically, you are creating micro applications within the Webflow platform that live on your website domain. Think Lovable, Bolt, and similar generative application platforms but with tight control over brand.
Most customers use Webflow because they can set up their entire design systems in it, Wolan says. Colors, typography components, navigation, footers, all provide consistency across sites and are the guardrails needed so people don't publish the wrong thing or not on brand:
That's where we're really focused, is how do we ensure that you get an app that looks like something you're proud of to put alongside your brand. To build an app the way that you want it to show up, right? And that is secure, will be stable. That's the bet that we're placing, is that security really, really matters.
Wolan showed me the App Gen product and how easy it is to build an application. Like other generative application solutions, you tell App Gen what you want in natural language and it goes off and designs and builds the application, adhering to the design system already set up with your website - the design system and content management system (CMS) are natively integrated. You continue to adapt and improve the app through a back and forth with the system, and you see everything the system does including files created, documentation created, and features built.
It can connect to your CMS for content to use, use prebuilt components (like your footer), and it can create new CMS collections based on what you ask for. Wolan points out that the person using App Gen likely isn't the person who set up the site and the design:
We wanted something that was a little bit more generic, because we didn't want to ring fence what people would actually build. And then we wanted people to experiment. And I think that's the thing that I'm most struck by in general with App Gen, is that all of a sudden there are people who were not developers, who now can actually go and experiment, and don't have to pay an agency $20,000 to go and build that contest app that they wanted. And so that's where I get very excited because I think that there's going to be all kinds of things we just never even envisioned that they end up using the platform for.
A few examples of what you can build include a custom meeting scheduler - I built this one quickly in a sandbox environment - interactive maps, chatbots built using Open AI's chatkit (Wolan showed one that helped visitors plan parties and included a lead gen form to get more help), interactive quizzes, and so on.
If you create an app that integrates with other systems, such as a Google calendar, or email service, the system will provide you with instructions to connect these systems.
Wolan explains that the underlying Large Language Model changes based on what the user is requesting, with Webflow trying to be smart about making sure brands get the best possible result:
If you think about it, all of those models are optimizing for different use cases, and then they may also converge at some point. But every single time there's like a model change, you want to make sure that you are providing your customer with the best possible experience. And so we're very focused on the best model wins for different use cases. And so some might be very good at doing the back end work, where it requires a lot of trying and then breaking something and going backwards and then trying again. That's a kind of persistent memory problem, versus some models are very good at UX generation. So it just kind of depends on what task you're asking it to do, and we want to make sure that we help you accomplish that task.
The other important thing is that Webflow has environment variables that store API keys and other secrets and the system uses these variables instead of putting the actual values directly in the application files.
Right now, App Gen is in public beta and available to everyone. Once it goes GA (generally available), brands will get AI credits to apply to it, and can purchase additional credits if needed.
Along with App Gen, Webflow also introduced its AI site builder not too long ago. Using natural language you can tell the builder what you want and it will generate an editable theme that you can modify. It's also fully integrated with the 300 plus applications in Webflow's ecosystem. The Site Builder includes an AI assistant and can generate a CMS. The Site Builder is actively being improved, so it's not a one and done system.
Webflow offers a lot of AI products out of the box. Wolan believes that everyone wants these capabilities and they are focused on making everything feel very seamless and native:
We're very focused, number one, on making it so that you can create experiences for AI native experiences like answer engines. So we want to make sure that your website is still quite relevant in this new era. And then we also believe that there's going to be a whole new breed of experiences that get created, like when ChatGPT introduced their new apps, right? We think that is going to be a place where brands want to engage. And so we're very focused on making sure that our platform helps you support not only apps, not only websites, not only web apps, but also all kinds of new kinds of app experiences that are going to be necessary in this new environment.
In Webflow's 2026 State of the Website, only 34% of marketing and tech leaders said they were satisfied with their current website, and they are under increasing pressure from customers and new innovations to make changes. They see AI as a way to create the experiences necessary, but face challenges adopting AI in the best way.
Part of the challenge is the overwhelming amount of AI tools available. How do you decide which ones to use and how do you build the right tech stack for your organization, keeping mind that you need to create a stack that non-technical people will likely need access to.
Webflow is thinking about all of this and building an environment that empowers all types of people, from developers to content marketers. Having tightly integrated tools is important, as is having an environment where you can define your brand design once and have it used in all your website and app experiences.
When I tested App Gen in a Webflow sandbox, it was easy to see you could build just about anything. But it was also clear that although it was built with non-technical users in mind, depending on what a person was trying to build, there are still some technical considerations that may require a more experienced person (or developer). For example, the meeting scheduler I built needed to connect to a Google Calendar and also send an email - both requiring connections to be set with Google and an email provider. App Gen did provide the instructions to do the connections, but a less technical person might struggle to do that part.
Overall though, I am excited at what App Gen brings to the table - the ability to quickly build micro app experiences that live on the website that create engagement you wouldn't otherwise get clicking through static pages. You are only limited by your imagination and we all know that marketers often have creative ideas but not the skills to build them.
The question of how much using App Gen will cost once it goes GA remains. With other generative application platforms, the costs can get pretty high when you are constantly purchasing tokens or credits to build and refine apps. That may be the only limiting factor going forward.
