Webflow just scanned 2,000 real websites and gave them a report card on how ready they are for AI search. The median score? A 2 out of 5. And the reason companies are failing isn't the reason LinkedIn keeps telling you.
Dave Steer — CMO of Webflow, with prior stops at Twitter, Facebook, eBay, PayPal, Cloudflare, and GitLab — joins Stephanie Postles to unpack what the data actually says: the failure point isn't content volume, it's the technical basics of your website. Broken internal links. Missing schema. No bylines. Stale content. Fix those four things and you'll pull ahead of a category that's failing them all.
Then Dave goes deeper — why AEO breaks the siloed marketing org, why hiring an 'integrated marketer' won't fix your silos, and why the teams that know how to fight well are the ones that are going to win.
What you'll learn
• Why the median website scores a 2 out of 5 on AI discovery readiness — and what that actually looks like under the hood
• The 4 technical fixes (internal links, schema, bylines, content freshness) that will move you up the AEO maturity index this week
• Why AEO can't be one person's job — and what a cross-functional weekly cadence actually looks like (the Reddit task force story)
• Why hiring an 'integrated marketer' doesn't create an integrated team — and what an 'orchestrator' role does instead
• The Tuckman model of high-performing teams, and why 'silos exist because of conflict aversion' — not because of org design
• The 3 expertise sets every modern CMO needs — and why nobody is world-class at all three
Connect
Chapters
• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:22 The biggest shift Dave has seen in two decades of marketing
• 3:24 CMO 1.0 vs CMO 2.0 — from campaigns to systems
• 5:34 What's actually working (and not) across millions of websites
• 8:28 'AI has fundamentally rewritten the buyer journey — under our feet'
• 9:42 The 4 pillars of AEO maturity (and why it's a team sport)
• 12:14 'What we learned shocked us' — the 2,000-site scan
• 13:54 Why 'just make more content' is making the internet worse
• 16:15 The 4 technical fixes: links, schema, bylines, freshness
• 18:29 Can AI help do these basic checks?
• 20:47 The Reddit task force — what cross-functional AEO actually looks like
• 26:58 Building high-performing teams (Tuckman model + conflict)
• 31:26 The integrated marketing hire that didn't integrate anything
• 36:03 'The teams that know how to do this will beat the teams that don't'
• 37:52 Trust is the highest-order bit — your name is your guarantee
• 39:37 Is the CMO role dying? The 2.0 answer.
• 41:01 The one skill every CMO needs to unlearn
• 42:46 Lightning round