The growth of social media and AI means organizations need to change the way they engage with customers through their websites. Traditional website traffic is decreasing as customers do more research through social media before visiting sites, and because an increasing amount of website traffic is coming from AI based searches through agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity and others. Linda Tong, CEO of website development and hosting platform Webflow, explains:
One of the challenges that marketing teams face is that search traffic is declining. It's not even just dropping a little bit. It is cratering. For many companies they're seeing as high as a 24-30% drop in search traffic.
It's because of two things. One, the way that people are engaging with brands. They're now hitting many more touch points before they actually come to your website, so you're seeing fewer people come in.
Second is the rise of AI agent solutions. We're seeing a lot of historical search traffic shift to agents, with more advanced search functionality. Before 100% of traffic came from Google searches, now a larger and larger percentage of that comes from things like ChatGPT and Gemini.
But in its annual survey of marketing directors, Webflow found more than 90% said websites still drive more revenue than any other marketing platform. So this decline in traffic has significant implications for organizations if they are to ensure that website visitors do lead to increased revenue.
Its survey also reported that 90% of marketing tech stacks had grown in the last 12 months, and that 69% of marketing directors plan to increase or maintain their investment in AI to support web initiatives in the year ahead.
Webflow has its origins in the creative sphere, and was designed to let marketing teams visually build, manage, and optimize websites, without having to rely on system developers. But having begun life in 2013 as a self-service product, four and half years ago it entered the enterprise space, and customers now include the likes of NCR, Dell, Spotify, Philips, Dropbox and the New York Times. Tong comments:
We started building more features and functionality, growing many of our existing customers, and started going out to larger corporations. We incorporated more enterprise features including security, compliance elements and scale, but without losing all the flexibility. Webflow empowers marketing teams to actually own the website, which is really rare in some of these large companies.
As website engagement changes, Workflow has launched a range of AI-powered updates to its platform, including Webflow Analyze, which helps marketers make decisions based on data from their websites; Webflow Optimize, which has AI-powered A/B testing and personalization, learning from website visitors in real time; and Webflow AI Assistant, which allows team members to use conversational prompts to design and generate new content for a site's existing design.
Webflow's survey found marketing directors had three priorities for the year ahead, all of which were technology driven. The first was experimenting using data-driven website strategies that will lead to better understanding of visitors, and convert more into customers. The second was improving the accessibility and use of tools, and the third priority was delivering more powerful user website experiences.
Flexibility is key according to Tong. She comments:
It's not just about building and launching a website. We think of websites as living, breathing things, so they need to be constantly managed, iterated, updated, changed, transformed, and they can't be static. Websites should have the flexibility of transforming and changing based on who walks in the front door, and we shouldn't be treating something that's so dynamic in a static way.
Webflow has included optimization and analytics onto its platform aided by the acquisition of Intellimize, a startup that uses AI to personalize websites and provide better web optimization, but also with its own analytics solution. Tong explains:
People can now look for insights, optimize workflows and traffic patterns, and ensure people get to where they need to go. Based on different segments, they can start to create unique flows for different customers coming on to their landing pages, and ensure they get a very personalized experience.
Information about visitor behavior helps contextualize the experience they receive. She goes on:
We look at where they're coming from? What advertisement did they click? Have we seen them before? Do we know anything about their demographics? Based on that kind of metadata, we can automatically create different cohorts or different segments that become really interesting, and those segments can then be fed different experiences that are constantly optimized for that segment alone.
I do think that dynamic experiences on the web are going to be so critical, especially with how people are now searching, and what people are expecting of their digital experiences.
Tong believes that AI search engines are flipping marketing on its head, and businesses that were built on SEO will have to change. She says:
There are businesses whose entire job is to maximize how you land on a search result. If a whole percentage of that is going away, you're going to have to optimize against a smaller percentage. And the big question is how do you do the equivalent for an AI search engine? For example, when you search something that Gemini supports, you'll see the AI overview, and then you'll see four or five ads. And so even in the first page, you don't see any organic search results that you would have in SEO. So it just completely flips.
She believes marketing directors will have to measure success very differently, versus what they used to measure in terms of search volume, click-through rates from search to website, and conversion rates of those clicks into purchases. She concludes:
It's not that people's interest in your product has gone down, but the way that they find it is different. With your website you have to find out how traffic is coming, and you have to make up for the difference with your conversion rate. These people have probably done more research, probably know more about you when they hit your website than they did before. So why would you treat them as if they were a new person who's never met you, and why would you just drop them on your homepage?
A lot of AI talk is about empowering staff, and improving efficiencies and ROI. For marketing leaders the challenge is clear. The increase in AI-enabled searches and reduced website visitor numbers means they have to think differently. Clicks no longer matter as much as having better, data-driven personalization and more dynamic website experiences.
