I built the same landing page in WordPress, Webflow, and Next.js. Here's the build time, cost, and AI-visibility difference.

Same layout, same copy, same goal — three different platforms. I tracked how long each one took to build, what it costs monthly, and how each scored on our AEO checker.

The Comparison

Platform	Build Time	Monthly Cost	Notes
WordPress	~3 hrs	~$25 (hosting + theme/plugins)	Fastest to get a page live using a pre-built theme
Webflow	~2 hrs	~$35	Visual builder, fastest for design iteration
Next.js (Vercel)	~5 hrs	$0 on free tier	Slowest to build, most control over output

Why Next.js Scored Higher on AI Visibility

The gap came down to control over the underlying markup. With Next.js, I could hand-write exactly the schema, meta tags, and heading structure I wanted, and set robots.txt explicitly. With WordPress and Webflow, a lot of that structure is generated by the theme or builder, and customizing it means either fighting the platform's defaults or adding a plugin.

Where WordPress Lost Ground

Most WordPress themes don't ship with JSON-LD schema out of the box — you generally need a plugin (like Yoast or RankMath) to add it, and each plugin adds its own overhead and occasionally conflicting settings if you're not careful about which one owns your schema output.

Where Webflow Landed

Webflow sits in between — it gives more direct control over meta tags and some schema than a typical WordPress theme, but still less low-level flexibility than hand-writing a Next.js page, particularly for advanced or custom schema types.

What I Learned

If build speed and non-technical editing matter most, WordPress or Webflow are the pragmatic choice — most sites don't need hand-tuned schema. But if AI visibility and full control over how the page presents itself to crawlers is the priority, the extra build time on Next.js buys real, measurable advantages in exactly the areas that determine whether AI search systems can parse and cite the page cleanly.