How I Automate My Website – Airtable Webflow Integration
AI researches what doesn't require my brain power, so I can focus on generating unique insights.
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When I made my first steps with my website, I didn't know anything about websites. It all started with the idea to empower small businesses and the production of my first online course "AI Tools for Small Businesses". "Why should only big companies benefit from this new AI wave?" was my thought in 2023. So naively I created this website to promote the course on Squarespace. Little did I know that Squarespace is great for pretty and simple templated websites, but terrible for scaling and selling.
Also, trying to perform well on Google Search felt like riding a mechanical bull and I suffered badly from one of the "Helpful Content Updates" in October 2024. In this "extremely helpful" update my traffic was more than halved. It was time to professionalize and create a structure that would allow me to generate more content with my own unique insights and to leverage AI for everything else.
My office roomie Theo, who has been using Airtable for his Youtube production company for a long time already, suggested to use Airtable as a base and leveraging Webflow's powerful CMS collection. So we started building. Sweating. And sometimes regretting. For someone who doesn't know how to code, never worked with Airtable before and had no idea what a CMS collection is, it wasn't easy to go from 0 to 100. If everything is unknown, it can feel like swimming in an endless sea without seeing an island.
But today, I'm super happy I have continued to swim, the Airtable automations are super powerful and flexible. I love the Webflow design, which let us do things other builders like Lovable or Durable would never have been able to. But first things first, let me walk you through the setup of my Airtable Webflow integration. But you should definitely not miss my tips in the end.
The core problem is that these tools are great for getting a website up quickly, but they position every user in the same red sea. The templates, the structure, the content - it all looks and works the same. For a website that has to rank high on Google and ideally LLM mentions, that's a dealbreaker.
AI website builders also struggle with deep integrations. Connecting them to an external database like Airtable for real two-way data sync, automating workflows, or pulling data dynamically into collection pages is either not possible or requires workarounds that defeat the purpose of using them in the first place.
The tables can also be interconnected with each other, e.g. the Tools integrate into the Pages table in multiple ways, because on every page we at least mention one tool, on comparisons multiple.
The whole Airtable base is also dynamic, so if I make a change on one end, it's reflected in the connected field as well. This is crucial so we can keep things fresh and always up to date.
The other amazing thing about Airtable is that it's basically an AI platform, and you can use their automations or field agents to gather data for you. For instance I've setup various automations that automatically research tool prices, key features and fetch their logos for me. These are tasks a human doesn't necessarily have to do and couldn't add value to.
All we need from the Webflow side is the API connection to pull data from Airtable, which allows us to make unlimited updates.
Each CMS Collection has fields that map directly to design elements on the page. When the sync script connects Airtable and Webflow via the API, each field lands exactly where it belongs.
The real power is that collections are dynamic across the whole site. If a tool appears in a comparison and a standalone review, I update the data once in Airtable, the script syncs it to Webflow CMS, and both pages update automatically. When you're managing 300+ tools, that's not a nice-to-have - it's essential.
At first Webflow can be a bit intimidating because of the many options and settings, but in the end that's what makes it so useful.
We've made many mistakes along the way, the good thing is: you can learn from ours!
Less columns, more oversight
Big tables get messy and slow you down. Once you've built the full infrastructure and your two-way sync between Airtable and Webflow, you'll start setting up the automations. In some of our tables we have up to 200 fields and keeping a good overview is a real struggle. We could start cleaning up and deleting data points we no longer use, but if any of those have been mapped to Webflow, we risk breaking the script's configuration. So for now we keep it big and work around it. What I recommend: focus on 50 max per table and build it out from there, rather than the other way around.
Start with a Webflow template
Every single part of building this system was new to me: Airtable, the sync script, Webflow CMS. In hindsight, I wish I had made it easier on myself and started with an existing Webflow template instead of building my own from scratch. That would have made at least one element of this setup less overwhelming and more stable from the beginning.
Use field agents instead of automations
Field agents are AI-powered tools in Airtable that automatically retrieve, analyze, or generate data at the record level based on a custom prompt you write. They handle the full automation within a single column, so you don't need to build a separate script or chain together multiple reference points. They didn't exist when we first started building, but they do now, and they save a lot of setup time for straightforward automations. I love that I can set them up myself, adjust the prompt whenever needed, and don't need a developer if something stops working.
The big downside of the Airtable Webflow alliance is that it's intricate and prone to errors. It requires a lot of customization and if things break, I can't always fix them myself. That is absolutely the trade-off I'm willing to make. When I tested website builders for my comparison, I quickly realized: many tools are great for quickly assembling a homepage using information that's already out there, but they put you in the same red sea as every other website. In times of AI, you have to find something to distinguish yourself. On top of that, website builders like Lovable, Durable, or 10web quickly hit limitations and can't be integrated into your existing ecosystems as easily as they like to portray.
So as complex as our setup may be right now, it enables the exact right workflow with AI: automating the research and data sync tasks my brain shouldn't be blocked by, so that it has time to roam around and create unique ideas.
