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Welcome to The B2B CMO Podcast, a show for marketing executives who are redefining what it means to be a strategic leader. Join Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan every week as they talk with the very best Chief Marketing Officers who are navigating the modern marketing playbook and positioning themselves as strategic leaders.
Each episode, we unpack what it really takes to lead through complexity, earn trust at the strategy table, and shape the future of growth.
We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth.
For more marketing leadership resources, visit [b2bcmoproject.com](http://b2bcmoproject.com/).
Jon Miller (00:00):
Welcome to the B2B CMO Podcast, a show for marketing executives who are redefining what it means to be a strategic leader. I'm Jon Miller.
Sydney Sloan (00:08):
And I'm Sydney Sloan. Between us, we've led marketing orgs at companies like Marketo, which John founded, Demandbase, G2 and SalesLoft. For more marketing leadership resources, you can visit b2bcmoproject.com, and now let's get into the show. Hello and welcome to the B2B CMO Project. I am Sydney Sloan, and today we're partnering with Webflow for a conversation on one of the most urgent shifts in B2B marketing. My guest today is Guy Yalif, the Chief Evangelist at Webflow. And before Webflow, Guy co-founded Intellimize, which was a machine learning personalization company that Webflow acquired and has spent more than two decades at the intersection of ad tech, MarTech, and CMO leadership. He's a multi-time CMO as well, and he talks to hundreds of CMOs every quarter, leads Webflow's AEO practice. Congratulations, you also just shipped a product, and is one of the most clearest and most actionable thinkers on AEO that I've had the opportunity to talk to and partner with.
(01:10):
And he's also one of my favorite guys. Welcome guy. Awesome to be with you, Sydney.
Guy Yalif (01:17):
And the feeling is mutual.
Sydney Sloan (01:20):
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, we're going to get right into it, and we really want to look at your data because you capture a great amount of data, which shows something that still surprises most CMOs. 69% of B2B buyers have chosen a different vendor, chosen a different vendor because of what an LLM recommended. The shortlist is being built before sales teams can ever even enter the picture. And as someone who's talking to those hundreds of CMOs every quarter, what is your honest read on how fast this shift is happening and why is AEO a fundamentally different challenge than just doing SEO better?
Guy Yalif (01:57):
I think it is moving quickly because it is genuinely useful. Forrester surveyed a bunch of B2B marketers last year. 95% of them said, "I'm going to use LLMs as part of my buyer journey." And then a company you know very well, G2 surveyed folks, and 51% said, "I'm going to use LLMs more than I use Google." And then that other stat, 69% said, "I chose someone different." Again, why? Well, we as CMOs have been using word of mouth as the fastest, most trustworthy source of how to tackle a new problem, think about a new space, come up with a vendor shortlist. And while the LLMs don't equal the trust you and I have, for example, they are faster and they're available all the time. And how much attention do we give it? It's early days, and most of us are not showing up as often as I think any of us would like.
(02:47):
We ran our maturity assessment on a couple thousand sites, US cross-industry, cross sizes. Okay. The average mention rate, I'm a company, I want to be known for X, therefore I want to be in these answers, 16%. That's not a lot. And then how often were we linked back to? 6%. Way low. And our share of voice relative to our competitors, 15%. I don't know, CMO who wouldn't want more than that. And new in AEO different than SEO, it affects our ability to tell our stories because as we all know, it's reformulating all of our words. And so for those 2000 companies, we also looked at what was sentiment. Neutral. Factual was the median. What was accuracy? 63 out of a hundred on a made up scale, which translates to it routinely has a mix of correct and incorrect info about our brand. And lastly, our carefully crafted words, our storylines, how much did they get pulled through?
(03:49):
Not at all. 24 out of a hundred correlated to little to no connection to our actual position. So this change in buyer behavior is really impactful to both parts of our jobs as marketing leaders, building brand and driving revenue.
Sydney Sloan (04:02):
Incredible. And the fact that it is not pulling through our own story, that is a stat that frightens me because we know that the idea of building consensus across all of the fan sites and where it lives is what's going to drive the consistency in the way that the LLMs actually produce the answer. So that's work to be done. I call it spring cleaning, but now we have to do it every season, seasonal cleaning to make sure that those are out there consistently. Once the LLM does provide the list of results, the next thing that we need to look at, like we're running our AEO strategies, but the website is actually a really big part of that. And you personally have been running experiments on Webflow's own site and has some pretty striking results. Walk me through specifically what did you do with those six product pages?
(04:54):
The FAQ structure, the schema markup, and then what happened? And then broaden it. For a CMO who wants to move now, what are the two or three things that have the highest technical leverage when optimizing their website for AEO?
Guy Yalif (05:09):
It is eye-opening how, again, early days in a new medium, how much of an impact you can have and how quickly. I'm running some experiments. The person who's leading the experimentation is Vivian Huang, who leads our SEO/AEO team. And she identified our top six product pages and said, "Let me go experiment with the concept of making it easier for LLMs to understand the structure and meaning of the content on our site." Which if you're looking for a north star in the technical part of AEO, there's content technical authority measurement. That would be the north star. Okay, so take those six pages, take the content that's on them, add FAQs to the bottom, that repeats that same content, but in a structured way. And then add schema to it, which many of us know, but for those that don't, it's another form of metadata where you are saying in something the machine can read, but the humans can't.
(05:58):
Here's what the structure is. Okay, those six pages in two weeks got 57% of the new citations webflow got, more than half. That's cool. When you realize we have a quarter of a million pages, it blew my mind and they got 24% more traffic in two weeks. Not like search where you're going to spend months building authority. Why is this hard? Why is this a high leverage thing to do? Schema's a great example. It's something where you genuinely need an engineer and a marketer in the same room at the same time. And that kind of almost never happens, which by the way is why we built auto generation of it. More broadly, getting good at this technically and overall has a huge impact across those 2000 sites in our made up scale of one is good SEO, five is good AEO, the medium brand was a two.
(06:50):
If you went from level one to level three, you get mentioned 2.3 times as often and you get links back via citations 3.7 times as often. And so this work on AEO maturity absolutely has a big impact on our ability to drive revenue. And you asked about the teams. Your AEO team is your SEO team and your AEO agency is your SEO agency because good AEO is very close to a good SEO, always should have
Sydney Sloan (07:18):
Been. I think the team is actually broader than just your agency. I think this is an all-encompassing all-out marketing assault on AEO. It's your product marketers who are building out your personas and having them continuing to be updated, learned, and expanded for not just winning the answer when someone's in the buying process, but also when someone is trying to build brand with that persona. I think SEO before could be a small group and an agency. I think the impact the AEO has now needs to have even board level visibility and full team effort.
Guy Yalif (07:54):
I couldn't agree more. Both of us lived through search 1.0. I had the privilege of being at one of the two great companies in that era. Sadly the wrong one. I was at Yahoo, but I still learned a ton. And to your point, it was a board level issue back then. Okay, 15, 20 years of maturity. SEO is specialized, matured, got its own career track, and it's a board level issue for traffic arbitrage businesses and when it's failing. AEO is a board level issue for everybody now, and I couldn't agree with you more in that it is more intensely cross-functional. You think about those four categories, content, you nailed it. You named it. It's product marketing and your content team. Technical will touch also your engineering and product management teams. Authority will touch brand and PR. You've been a great advocate of how important brand is for AEO.
(08:39):
I couldn't agree more. And measurement, markups, analytics. To do this new think, well, you need this whole village working together.
Sydney Sloan (08:47):
So that was an amazing answer of all the things it can do. For those of you that are listening, you can get your own website assessment, and I give this link out all the time, hopefully it's still the right one, at www.webflow.com/solutions. So you can have your own website rated by the Webflow AEO grader, and it will give you specific recommendations of what technically you can do to improve your performance. It's a must-do. If you've not done this yet, it is the lowest hanging fruit. Okay, so we're going to go back for a second. We're talking about this AEO maturity model that you've created and refined over time. And you talked about your survey finding that 93% of CMOs say AI will matter more to their whole business in the next two years, but only 25% of practitioners say they really understand it. And so the media and company is sitting at this two out of five on your AEO maturity scale, and you've described AEO as more of a team sport than SEO.
(09:43):
We've all settled those things. For a CMO watching this right now who needs to build momentum fast, where do they start and what does it take to get the organization actually moving?
Guy Yalif (09:55):
Three parts of the answer. First, the thank you for suggesting the assessment. I hope people find it useful. It's at webflow.com/aeoma, AEOmaturity Assessment.
(10:05):
One. Two, if you only did two things, think about answering questions and adding schema. If you only were guiding your team on two things, assuming they've got the fundamentals well. But the third point I wanted to share was the results of our analysis of the 2000 sites and that we do have fundamentals to work on. I was genuinely surprised that some historical fundamentals are still an issue. 62% of the sites had too many broken links. Internal to their site, we made up 10% as the threshold. 61% of sites had illogical heading structure, like just H1, H2, H3, they skipped that. 60% of sites had too much missing metadata, more than 20% of pages. And one that will probably bite a bit more, but the LLMs really value it a lot, is 54% of sites hadn't even updated 10% of their content in the last six months.
(11:01):
So content was stale. That's existing fundamentals. Three new fundamentals, to your point about brand and consistency and what the LLMs are looking for. 73% of sites didn't have enough mentions on the sites that were part of the answers to the questions they care about. 57% of them didn't answer the questions prospects are asking. They had good keyword coverage, but they didn't answer questions. And 55% of sites didn't show, I've got topical authority by putting bylines on pages that should have them because the LLMs are looking for that. So there are a bunch of fundamentals we can all tackle and then go after answer questions and add schema.
Sydney Sloan (11:45):
The quick win is to go and tidy up your website, look for contents consistency across the sites that the LLMs are sourcing for those answers and keep those consistent, which is hard. But you'll see the quick wins there. And my last favorite part about this is answer the questions your customers are asking. Wow, what a fundamental concept, right? So I think let's take this back to the fundamentals of marketing and really understanding what our customers care about.
Guy Yalif (12:16):
Go ask your content team to run an LLM over their sales call recordings, and then just go create five blog posts on your updated website that goes and makes them visible to the LLMs. Literally go run an LLM over your gone calls or your sales call recordings over your sales and support emails. That is literally ground truth. And that is being rewarded because when we all learned to speak Google, our average query was four words long. Now it's 23 words long and growing, so you get to talk more like your prospects are asking questions.
Sydney Sloan (12:46):
Well, I knew this was going to be a quick fire way to up-level your AEO strategies and get that quick win impact. And because, Guy, you are a sponsor of the B2B CMO project, thank you so much for that. Why should someone use Webflow?
Guy Yalif (13:01):
People should use Webflow if they care about empowering their marketing team and showing up in answer engines. Full stop. Webflow is an agentic web marketing platform that makes it really easy for the developers, designers, and marketers in your world, together with the agencies and agents you are working with, to build, manage, and optimize your sites, personalizing them and being emotionally evocative for the humans, and then being really efficient communicators for the LLMs because that's what they care about.
Sydney Sloan (13:29):
Well, thank you so much. We run our website on Webflow, so thank you for providing that to us. I hope everybody learns something that's actionable that you could take away right now. And if you'd like to learn more about topics that B2B enterprise CMOs care about, you can join us at theb2bcmoproject.com, and that's where all our assets and podcasts reside and join our community if you'd like to. Thank you.
Guy Yalif (13:52):
Thanks, Sydney.
Jon Miller (13:54):
Thanks for listening to the B2B CMO Podcast. Head on over to theb2bcmoproject.com for more episodes, plus the latest research and framework CMOs need, not just to survive, but actually thrive as AI and the new playbook reshape how we go to market. And if this episode sparks something for you, please follow the show, leave a rating, and share it with a marketing leader who could use a little inspiration. Special thanks to our wonderful partners, OneMind, 2X, Cheq, Demandbase, G2, Goldcast, LinkedIn, Phave, Sendoso, and Webflow for making this podcast possible. Until next time, be safe out there.