What Is the Point of a Website?
TL;DR A website's job has expanded. It now needs to communicate clearly to two audiences simultaneously: the human who lands on the page and the AI that reads the code underneath it. AI systems don't scroll, don't trigger animations, and can't see content hidden behind JavaScript interactions. If your most important message only appears after an interaction, the machine may never see it. Brand clarity and AEO credibility point in the same direction. Specific, verifiable claims on your site train AI models to associate your brand with authority, not just awareness. The gap between how a brand describes itself and how AI represents it is the brief. Running your site through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity before a redesign starts is one of the fastest diagnostics you’ve got. Brands that struggle in AI search are usually brands whose story was already fuzzy for humans. The just machine makes the problem more visible.
TL;DR
- A website now has two audiences: the human who lands on it and the AI reading the code underneath.
- If your most important message only appears after an interaction, AI may never see it.
- Specific, verifiable claims train AI to associate your brand with authority, not just awareness.
- Running your site through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity before a redesign is one of the fastest diagnostics you've got.
- Brands that struggle in AI search usually had a fuzzy story for humans first. The machine just makes it visible.
Stripe has been one of my favorite B2B brand sites, and they just redesigned. The previous version ran for six years, which is forever on the web, and set a standard for considered design most brands are still chasing.
Katie Dill, Stripe's Head of Design, sat down with Y Combinator recently to walk through the new site. And watching it, I kept coming back to a question Patrick Collison apparently asked in a meeting during the redesign process: What is the point of a website, anyway?
It sounds simple…but it isn't. And the answer has changed in ways most brands haven't caught up to yet.
The old model: add sections, hope people scroll.
Stripe's previous site grew the way most do. Clear at launch, then layered over time. A new product here, a new audience there. By the end, you were getting glimpses of what Stripe did without ever getting the full picture. AI was one of their biggest growth areas, and it was showing up as a tile, and that wasn’t enough to create the signal Stripe needed in this new world.
Your website is where authority gets established, for humans and for AI.
A site is the owned space where authority is built. For customers, for prospects, and increasingly, for the AI systems forming opinions about your company before anyone visits a page.
“You’re demonstrating who you are, what you are doing, and why you do it. What colors you choose, what typography you choose, the details that you choose to care about and the ones you don’t, and then, of course, how you articulate what you’re doing and what you offer.”
— Katie Dill, Head of Design, Stripe. Watch the full segment at 5:30
And when Stripe rebuilt theirs, they weren't just refreshing visuals. They were clarifying a story that the business had grown beyond.
The job has already been clarity, it’s just now, your audience has doubled from humans to humans + bots.
Specificity is what makes AI cite you.
The new Stripe site has a live counter showing what percentage of global GDP runs through their platform. It signals trust. It also signals authority to the AI systems deciding which sources to cite.
AI systems cite sources they consider authoritative. The signals they use to determine authority include the consistency and specificity of claims a brand makes about itself across the web. A live counter showing global GDP processed is a specific, verifiable claim. It's the kind of detail that trains the model to associate Stripe with scale and reliability.
Stripe built it to signal trust. The AEO benefit is a byproduct. That's how brand clarity and AEO credibility point in the same direction. For a deeper look at how AI rankings for commercial prompts actually work, and how specificity factors in, that post is a good place to start.
An AEO-ready website isn’t one with more content. It’s one with content that’s specific enough that an AI system can accurately describe what you do, who you serve, and why you’re different in a single sentence.
Building for two audiences means rethinking what "visible" means.
This is where designing with AI changes the brief. When I work on a Webflow build with my team at Edgar Allan, we're thinking about two audiences at once. The human who lands on the page and the AI that reads the code underneath it.
The two audiences experience your site completely differently.
AI doesn't scroll. It doesn't trigger animations. It doesn't see the hero image or feel the weight of the typography. What Vivian Huang at Webflow discovered when she audited their own site is that content hidden behind scroll triggers and JavaScript reveals might not exist to a machine at all. If your most important message only appears after an interaction fires, the AI crawling your page may never see it.
Stripe solved this by leading with content present from the start and being more direct on the page. Katie Dill noted that this made the site feel more approachable for humans too. Clarity tends to do that.
The way we start every AEO-focused Webflow project at Edgar Allan: run the existing site through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity and ask each one to describe what the brand does, who it serves, and how it's different. What comes back is what prospects are seeing before they ever visit the site. That gap between the brand's self-description and the AI's representation is the brief.
From there, the work is about closing the distance. Semantic HTML that communicates structure clearly. Content written for humans first, but structured so machines can extract it accurately. Schema markup, clean metadata, and a content hierarchy that doesn't depend on JavaScript to make sense. The Webflow AEO checklist we published covers the specific technical and content fixes that move the needle fastest.
Profound has become a core part of how we work. It surfaces which prompts a brand appears in, which ones it's missing, and gives us a measurable baseline to work from. AEO without measurement is just guessing.
Ask the question before every project, not after.
So, what is the point of this website? For this brand, at this moment, for these two audiences, human and machine, what does it need to say and how does it need to say it?
The brands getting this right aren't treating AEO as a separate workstream from brand and design. They're building sites where the story is clear enough that a machine can summarize it accurately, a human can feel it immediately, and an AI system defaults to citing it when someone asks a question this brand should own.
That's the whole task. And it starts with a question that Patrick Collison asked in a meeting that Stripe spent a year trying to answer. We've also written more on what happens to websites when AI shifts discovery upstream entirely, and it's worth reading alongside this: When Discovery Disappears.
Watch the full video here
What is AEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO is the practice of optimizing your site so search engines rank it highly in a list of links. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the practice of making sure AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity accurately represent your brand when someone asks a question you should own. SEO gets you found. AEO gets you cited. They overlap significantly at the foundation but diverge at the top. For a fuller breakdown, see our post on content strategy for AEO.
How does Webflow help with AEO?
Webflow generates clean semantic HTML by default, which gives AI crawlers a clear structure to read and interpret. It also supports schema markup, llms.txt files, and metadata natively, without plugins. Webflow AEO, launched in April 2026, adds an agentic layer that surfaces which prompts your brand appears in, recommends fixes, and ships improvements directly inside the platform.
What does designing with AI actually mean in practice?
It means building for two audiences simultaneously. The human who lands on the page and the machine that reads the code underneath it. In practice that means content present on the page from the start rather than hidden behind scroll triggers, semantic HTML that communicates structure and meaning clearly, and copy that answers the questions your buyers are asking in the language they use to ask them.
Why does brand voice matter for AEO?
When AI strips the visual layer of your site and reads only the text underneath, a distinct brand voice is one of the few things that survives the translation. If your copy sounds like everyone else in your category, AI will represent you like everyone else in your category. Originality and specificity in your writing are not just good brand practice. They are AEO signals. This connects directly to why AI search rewards higher-quality, more human content.
How do I know how AI is representing my brand right now?
Start by running your brand through the major AI tools. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to describe what you do, who you compete with, and what makes you different. What comes back is what your prospects are seeing before they ever visit your site. Tools like Profound give you a more systematic view, tracking which prompts you appear in and which ones you're missing.
What is the most common AEO mistake brands make?
Treating it as a separate workstream from brand and design. AEO isn't a technical fix you layer on top of an existing site. It starts with having a clear, consistent, specific story. Brands that struggle in AI search are usually brands whose narrative was already fuzzy for humans. The machine just makes the problem more visible.
Where does Edgar Allan fit in all of this?
We design and build Webflow sites with AEO built into the brief from day one. That means auditing how AI currently represents a brand before we start, designing for both human and machine audiences throughout the build, and using tools like Profound to measure visibility and iterate after launch. If you're thinking about a redesign or want to understand how your site shows up in AI search, reach out.
Stripe has been one of my favorite B2B brand sites, and they just redesigned. The previous version ran for six years, which is forever on the web, and set a standard for considered design most brands are still chasing.
Katie Dill, Stripe's Head of Design, sat down with Y Combinator recently to walk through the new site. And watching it, I kept coming back to a question Patrick Collison apparently asked in a meeting during the redesign process: What is the point of a website, anyway?
It sounds simple…but it isn't. And the answer has changed in ways most brands haven't caught up to yet.
The old model: add sections, hope people scroll.
Stripe's previous site grew the way most do. Clear at launch, then layered over time. A new product here, a new audience there. By the end, you were getting glimpses of what Stripe did without ever getting the full picture. AI was one of their biggest growth areas, and it was showing up as a tile, and that wasn’t enough to create the signal Stripe needed in this new world.
Your website is where authority gets established, for humans and for AI.
A site is the owned space where authority is built. For customers, for prospects, and increasingly, for the AI systems forming opinions about your company before anyone visits a page.
“You’re demonstrating who you are, what you are doing, and why you do it. What colors you choose, what typography you choose, the details that you choose to care about and the ones you don’t, and then, of course, how you articulate what you’re doing and what you offer.”
— Katie Dill, Head of Design, Stripe. Watch the full segment at 5:30
And when Stripe rebuilt theirs, they weren't just refreshing visuals. They were clarifying a story that the business had grown beyond.
The job has already been clarity, it’s just now, your audience has doubled from humans to humans + bots.
Specificity is what makes AI cite you.
The new Stripe site has a live counter showing what percentage of global GDP runs through their platform. It signals trust. It also signals authority to the AI systems deciding which sources to cite.
AI systems cite sources they consider authoritative. The signals they use to determine authority include the consistency and specificity of claims a brand makes about itself across the web. A live counter showing global GDP processed is a specific, verifiable claim. It's the kind of detail that trains the model to associate Stripe with scale and reliability.
Stripe built it to signal trust. The AEO benefit is a byproduct. That's how brand clarity and AEO credibility point in the same direction. For a deeper look at how AI rankings for commercial prompts actually work, and how specificity factors in, that post is a good place to start.
An AEO-ready website isn’t one with more content. It’s one with content that’s specific enough that an AI system can accurately describe what you do, who you serve, and why you’re different in a single sentence.
Building for two audiences means rethinking what "visible" means.
This is where designing with AI changes the brief. When I work on a Webflow build with my team at Edgar Allan, we're thinking about two audiences at once. The human who lands on the page and the AI that reads the code underneath it.
The two audiences experience your site completely differently.
AI doesn't scroll. It doesn't trigger animations. It doesn't see the hero image or feel the weight of the typography. What Vivian Huang at Webflow discovered when she audited their own site is that content hidden behind scroll triggers and JavaScript reveals might not exist to a machine at all. If your most important message only appears after an interaction fires, the AI crawling your page may never see it.
Stripe solved this by leading with content present from the start and being more direct on the page. Katie Dill noted that this made the site feel more approachable for humans too. Clarity tends to do that.
The way we start every AEO-focused Webflow project at Edgar Allan: run the existing site through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity and ask each one to describe what the brand does, who it serves, and how it's different. What comes back is what prospects are seeing before they ever visit the site. That gap between the brand's self-description and the AI's representation is the brief.
From there, the work is about closing the distance. Semantic HTML that communicates structure clearly. Content written for humans first, but structured so machines can extract it accurately. Schema markup, clean metadata, and a content hierarchy that doesn't depend on JavaScript to make sense. The Webflow AEO checklist we published covers the specific technical and content fixes that move the needle fastest.
Profound has become a core part of how we work. It surfaces which prompts a brand appears in, which ones it's missing, and gives us a measurable baseline to work from. AEO without measurement is just guessing.
Ask the question before every project, not after.
So, what is the point of this website? For this brand, at this moment, for these two audiences, human and machine, what does it need to say and how does it need to say it?
The brands getting this right aren't treating AEO as a separate workstream from brand and design. They're building sites where the story is clear enough that a machine can summarize it accurately, a human can feel it immediately, and an AI system defaults to citing it when someone asks a question this brand should own.
That's the whole task. And it starts with a question that Patrick Collison asked in a meeting that Stripe spent a year trying to answer. We've also written more on what happens to websites when AI shifts discovery upstream entirely, and it's worth reading alongside this: When Discovery Disappears.
Watch the full video here
What is AEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO is the practice of optimizing your site so search engines rank it highly in a list of links. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the practice of making sure AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity accurately represent your brand when someone asks a question you should own. SEO gets you found. AEO gets you cited. They overlap significantly at the foundation but diverge at the top. For a fuller breakdown, see our post on content strategy for AEO.
How does Webflow help with AEO?
Webflow generates clean semantic HTML by default, which gives AI crawlers a clear structure to read and interpret. It also supports schema markup, llms.txt files, and metadata natively, without plugins. Webflow AEO, launched in April 2026, adds an agentic layer that surfaces which prompts your brand appears in, recommends fixes, and ships improvements directly inside the platform.
What does designing with AI actually mean in practice?
It means building for two audiences simultaneously. The human who lands on the page and the machine that reads the code underneath it. In practice that means content present on the page from the start rather than hidden behind scroll triggers, semantic HTML that communicates structure and meaning clearly, and copy that answers the questions your buyers are asking in the language they use to ask them.
Why does brand voice matter for AEO?
When AI strips the visual layer of your site and reads only the text underneath, a distinct brand voice is one of the few things that survives the translation. If your copy sounds like everyone else in your category, AI will represent you like everyone else in your category. Originality and specificity in your writing are not just good brand practice. They are AEO signals. This connects directly to why AI search rewards higher-quality, more human content.
How do I know how AI is representing my brand right now?
Start by running your brand through the major AI tools. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to describe what you do, who you compete with, and what makes you different. What comes back is what your prospects are seeing before they ever visit your site. Tools like Profound give you a more systematic view, tracking which prompts you appear in and which ones you're missing.
What is the most common AEO mistake brands make?
Treating it as a separate workstream from brand and design. AEO isn't a technical fix you layer on top of an existing site. It starts with having a clear, consistent, specific story. Brands that struggle in AI search are usually brands whose narrative was already fuzzy for humans. The machine just makes the problem more visible.
Where does Edgar Allan fit in all of this?
We design and build Webflow sites with AEO built into the brief from day one. That means auditing how AI currently represents a brand before we start, designing for both human and machine audiences throughout the build, and using tools like Profound to measure visibility and iterate after launch. If you're thinking about a redesign or want to understand how your site shows up in AI search, reach out.