Your Website Is Broken Because Nobody Wants an Argument, Webflow's CMO Says

Every marketing leader of the last decade has stood in front of a room and announced that it's time to break down the silos. Dave Steer has given that speech himself. He also thinks it does nothing.

"Silos exist because of conflict and conflict aversion," said Steer, Webflow's CMO, in a recent interview on the Marketing Trends podcast. "If you get people comfortable with conflict, then the silos break down almost naturally."

It's an uncomfortable thing to say out loud. It gets more expensive once you look at what silos are costing companies inside AI answers.

The Evidence Is in the Plumbing

Steer's team scored 2,000 websites, customers and non-customers alike, on answer engine optimization maturity. The question was how well each site was set up to be found and cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the rest. They went in believing what most of the industry believes, that content quality and off-site authority would matter more than the technical shape of the sites themselves.

"What we learned shocked us, to be honest," Steer said. "When we looked at the data, it wasn't the content, it was the technical parts of the website."

The median score across all 2,000 sites was two out of five. "So that's a failing grade," he said.

Two numbers account for most of it. Across the sites scanned, 62% of internal links were broken.

"That is like website hygiene 101," Steer said. "Just go scan all of your internal links, make sure that they're functional, that they're not broken."

Another 60% missed the basics on schema and metadata. Schema is the tagging layer that tells an engine what it's looking at, so it can tell a product page from an author byline without having to work it out. Six sites in ten were making the engines work it out.

Nobody decided to let this happen, which is what makes it interesting. You don't need anyone to make a bad call to end up here. You only need the work to sit outside everybody's job description.

Nobody Owns the Fix

Answer engine optimization doesn't sit where search optimization sat, and that accounts for most of the neglect.

"SEO could be one person or one function operating on their own," Steer said, tuning technical details against primarily one algorithm. AEO can't work that way, because a good share of the interventions happen somewhere you don't own. His team splits maturity into four areas. There's the content you create, the technical state of your digital experience, the authority you build off the site, and the measurement that tells you whether any of it works. In most companies, those four sit in four different reporting lines.

So the work falls into the seams between them. Web assumes content owns freshness. Content assumes web owns links. Neither one raises it, because raising it means telling a peer their area is failing, and nobody has scheduled that conversation.

Steer's answer was a task force. Early on, when Reddit was one of the main sources answer engines drew from, he pulled together a cross-functional group that included the community manager, the AEO and SEO leads, product managers and content people. They met every Monday, went through what they were seeing, decided what to intervene on, ran the play and did it again. Some of the interventions were on the website. Most weren't.

That same group has since widened its scope. YouTube, Steer said, now matters quite a bit.

He wouldn't speculate about the recent drop in Reddit citations. "I don't work for the Frontier Lab, so I can't tell you if it's a meaningful shift." Instead he made a durability argument. Be a meaningful contributor wherever your customers actually gather, give more than you take, and put out a point of view that invites a response. His warning, drawn from years at eBay, is that companies routinely assume everyone is already part of their community. eBay worked because it went out to the communities.

"That's the type of thing that will outlast the trend of is it this platform or this platform or this platform."

The Storm Is the Point

Steer builds teams against the Tuckman model, the one that runs form, storm, norm, perform. Most leaders treat the storm as something to get through. He treats it as the part that makes everything after it possible.

"Teams that know how to fight well, those are the teams that are gonna win in the future," he said. The teams too nice to enter the conflict zone don't.

He's specific about the method, and none of it is glamorous. Build psychological safety first. Then name the disagreement out loud before you get into it, and ask permission to have it. We don't agree on this. It's a good conversation for us to have. It's normal, it's healthy, we'll both be better for it, is that okay with you. And when the room tightens, say so, rather than letting it curdle.

"It feels uncomfortable. That's a feature, not a bug. Let's keep on going."

Steer calls himself conflict-averse by nature and credits a coach, plus a therapist spouse, for most of what he knows about this. That's worth holding onto, because he isn't describing a personality type that happens to win. He's describing something teachable, aimed at people who find it unpleasant, which is most people.

Integrated Marketing Is Not a Job Title

The obvious move, when you see silos, is to hire somebody to bridge them. Steer made that move, recruiting a senior integrated marketing lead he'd worked with before and rates among the best marketers he knows.

What the two of them concluded is the useful part. "Simply having a function called integrated marketing does not create integrated marketing."

The gap sat a step upstream. No strategy was understood and held in common across every team, so there was no shared basis for working out who depended on whom for what. Adding a coordinator to a company that hasn't agreed on the plan just gives the ambiguity a full-time owner.

So the role got rewritten. She would map the interlocks between teams. She'd keep a bird's-eye view on the big moments, like the company's annual conference. And she'd orchestrate.

Orchestration is where AI comes in, and Steer is unromantic about it. He treats AI teammates like interns, eager to please and useless without full context. What came out of it was a workflow that generates creative briefs, fed by the company's positioning and messaging strategy. Revenue marketing no longer has to queue behind product marketing and content to get a brief written. They serve themselves, and what they produce comes out integrated anyway, because the strategy is baked into the tool instead of negotiated in a meeting.

"You take a role like that, you make it about orchestration, and then you make it about self-servicing the other parts of the team, and then you start to see impact."

Four Fixes, Starting Tomorrow

None of the cultural work clears the maintenance backlog on its own. Steer named four things any team can start on this week.

1. Audit your internal links. Scan the site and repair what's broken. It's the highest-yield item on the list, and the one most teams assume somebody else already handled.

2. Fix metadata and schema. Tag your content so the engines can classify it without guessing.

3. Add bylines and sources. A bot landing on your page is trying to work out one thing quickly, which is whether it can trust the source. Steer suggests taking bylines past the blog. "Consider doing that on your product pages as well. That actually really helps out the answer engines feel like this is a credible source, and not just a bunch of slop that's out there."

4. Certify freshness. Steer points to Rotten Tomatoes. Set a visible standard for how current a piece has to be, then hold to it.

"Do those four things, I guarantee you'll score better," he said.

The fourth one carries a liability most teams have never priced, and Steer puts himself among the offenders. "Engineers have this thing called technical debt. I call it marketing debt when you just have content that you put out there and you haven't actually done anything with."

His example is the pricing page, which should make revenue leaders nervous. An answer engine reads whatever is sitting on that page and treats it as source of truth. If the numbers are old, those are the numbers a prospect gets, and that prospect may never visit the site to find out otherwise. Stale content stops being a missed opportunity at that point and starts actively misinforming buyers, with nobody in the building able to see it happening.

Does fixing it pay? The only numbers on offer are vendor numbers, comparing sites that use Webflow's AEO tooling with sites that don't. They show 70% more mentions in AI engines and 120% more citations. Discount them accordingly. The direction of the claim holds up on the audit alone. Technical hygiene is worth something right now because so few teams bother with it.

Your Name Is Your Guarantee

Six months into Webflow's AI-native marketing blueprint, Steer is rolling out what he calls phase two. Phase one was about speed. This one is about trust.

It comes down to one principle. Everybody in marketing is a guardian of trust, and your name is your guarantee. "If work goes out with your name on it, you own every idea in it. The structure, the emphasis, the numbers, the conclusion, the craft, and you should be able to defend it."

He's aiming it at what phase one produced, which was a lot of content. His read on the market-wide version is that volume is pushing everyone toward the mean. To hit the targets they've set themselves, teams generate with AI that hasn't been grounded in brand context, tone of voice or any real point of view.

"The result for the consumer of that content is kind of a reversion to the mean, where not only everything looks like it's being written by AI, but also the underlying thoughts aren't actually unique to the brand that is putting them out."

Asked which marketing strategy is most overrated, he answered immediately. "Content development for the sake of content. I don't think it's about quantity of content, it's about quality. Everyone needs to go deep on a point of view."

It's the same flattening we've documented before, coming at it from another angle. A brand is the people driving it, and those people have to hold the point of view themselves. "You can't delegate that."

That brings it back around to conflict. A point of view is, by definition, something a person can disagree with. Teams that can't argue with each other in private rarely publish anything worth arguing with in public.

CMO 2.0 Runs Systems, Not Campaigns

Average CMO tenure has sat around eighteen months for years, and Steer thinks he knows why. Leaders who define the job as campaigns run out of runway, because only so much campaign work can land inside that window. What he sees replacing it is closer to how a CTO or CIO thinks about the job, which is building the systems that let the team do the work rather than producing the work yourself.

The complication is that the role now asks for three separate areas of expertise, covering brand and storytelling, driving pipeline, and AI transformation. Steer doesn't think anybody is world-class at all three. "I certainly am not." His advice is to work out the two where you genuinely spike, go deep on those, and hire deliberately against the third, since the board will expect progress on all three either way.

The habit to unlearn is short-term thinking. Chasing quick points on the scoreboard tends to produce either the wrong wins or none at all, and both come back on the leader and the team. Resetting that expectation takes constant two-way communication with the rest of the executive suite, which a quarterly update doesn't cover. Steer's own rule is to hold his convictions strongly but not too firmly, so the conversation has somewhere to go.

He expects the underlying skill to become the thing people get hired on. As more of the working day goes into orchestrating agents and workflows, the ability to think on the human side turns into the scarce input, the thing that ends up on a LinkedIn endorsement.

"The teams that know how to do this will beat the teams that don't know how to do this, full stop."

The broken links are the cheap part. Any team can scan and repair a site inside a quarter, and while the category median sits at a two, doing it is worth more than it probably should be. The harder question is how they got broken and stayed broken, and the answer to that one isn't on the website.

Listen to the full episode with Dave Steer on the Marketing Trends podcast.