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The Webflow workspace ships with an AI chat that drives your Webflow site through the Webflow Data API. You describe the change; the chat calls the same operations the panels call, behind the same gates. It never writes project files, because a site that stays on Webflow has no Hiveku code to write. This page covers where the chat lives, what it will and will not do, and how to phrase a request so it lands the first time. If you have not connected a site yet, start with Connecting Webflow.

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Where the chat lives

The Webflow workspace

A resizable pane on the left of /<accountId>/dashboard/<projectId>/webflow, mounted before the rail so the AI works the site while the panels stay on the right. It remembers its width and open state per browser and opens by default on screens 1280 px and wider.

Department chats

SEO, Content, PPC and the rest reach the same Webflow operations from their own chats. Pin the department to the site by passing the project id; without it the department works at account level and cannot touch the site.

The mobile app

The iOS app carries a site chat for external Webflow projects, with the same locked mode, the same starter prompts and the same capability wording as the web workspace.
The mobile app deliberately copies the workspace’s capability and gate wording verbatim rather than writing its own, so the phone and the browser never disagree about what Hiveku can change. It adds one line the web does not need: Open this site in Hiveku on the web, because the phone cannot run the connect flow.

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Webflow mode, and why it is fixed

Every turn in the Webflow workspace runs in a dedicated Webflow chat mode. The mode dropdown stays visible in the composer, but it is locked, and hovering it gives the reason:
This site lives on Webflow, so every change goes through the Webflow API. Other modes need a Hiveku-hosted project.
The lock is not cosmetic. A server-side guard decides the mode before the turn runs, and it wins over whatever the client asked for: The guard exists because of a real failure: a turn on a Webflow site used to run the ordinary Next.js coder prompt against an empty workspace and persist whatever the model wrote as phantom project files. The Webflow mode carries edit: false in its definition, so the mode cannot write project files at all. The chat’s own role definition says the same thing in one sentence:
You operate a site that stays on Webflow through the Webflow Data API. You change CMS content, page titles, slugs, SEO and Open Graph, assets, custom code, form submissions, comments, ecommerce orders and publishing. You never write project files: pages, layout and styling live in the Webflow Designer.

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What to ask for

The composer offers five starter prompts, and they are a fair map of the surface:
  • Draft 5 blog posts into the Blog collection
  • Rewrite every page’s SEO title and description
  • Add our GA4 tag to the site
  • What changed since the last publish?
  • Publish the site
Anything in the table below works the same way. These are written to be pasted and edited.
Say what you want changed and where, not which API to call. The chat resolves collections, fields, pages and forms itself, and its own rules tell it to read before it writes: collection field slugs before an item write, the page list before a metadata write, the current site custom code before applying a script.

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What it refuses, and the words it uses

Webflow’s Data API cannot create, delete, rename or reorder pages, add, move or style elements, edit classes, components, interactions or variables, change page text in the primary language, author forms, or add locales. Rather than trying and failing, the chat refuses with one fixed script and does nothing else:
Through Webflow’s API Hiveku can change CMS collections, fields and items; page titles, slugs, SEO and Open Graph; images and files in Assets; custom code and scripts; form submissions; comments; ecommerce; publishing. It cannot create or delete pages, add, move or style elements, edit classes, components, interactions or variables, or change page text in the primary language. For that, open the Webflow Designer or convert this site to a Hiveku-hosted project.
It then offers the closest thing it actually can do: a CMS item, a redirect, an SEO change, a script.
The primary-locale limit is Webflow’s, not Hiveku’s. Webflow’s own documentation states that API-based updates to page and component content are limited to secondary locales, and that primary locale content for pages and components must be updated through the Webflow Designer. CMS item content is the exception: that is writable in both the primary and secondary locales.
If the site has a secondary locale, page and component text becomes writable in that locale only. With one locale, the workspace says so once:
This site has one locale. Webflow’s API only writes page and component text in a secondary locale. Add one under Localization in Webflow, or edit this text in the Designer.
Page titles, slugs, SEO, Open Graph and JSON-LD are not affected by this. Those write the primary locale and need no secondary locale at all — the gap is page body text.

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Three other refusals worth recognising

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Confirmations

The chat asks before anything it cannot undo through the API and before anything every visitor sees at once. Nineteen operations are confirm-gated, and a gated call without the confirmation is refused with 412 confirm_required rather than run. The gated set is deliberately small — the reasoning in the code is that a gate everyone always satisfies has stopped being a gate:
  • Deletes: a CMS item, a bulk item delete, a collection and every item in it, a field and its data, an asset, a form submission, a Google tag, every script Hiveku applied to the site, every script Hiveku applied to one page, a redirect, a robots rule, the site’s llms.txt, well-known files, a webhook
  • Money and fulfilment: fulfilling an order, refunding an order
  • Everyone sees it: publishing the site
  • Changes another system’s wiring: replacing robots.txt, updating a webhook
The chat’s own rules are explicit here: ask in plain words, wait for a yes, and never assume consent. A confirm-gated action that is asked for twice in the same breath still gets one question.
Publishing has a second gate on top of the confirmation. Webflow allows one successful publish per minute per site; a second inside that window answers 429 publish_cooldown with retry_after_seconds, and the chat reports the wait rather than hammering the endpoint.
A site publish ships every staged change on the site, not only the ones the chat just made — including work a teammate, another agent or a Designer session staged and has not mentioned. Before you say “publish the site”, ask the chat what changed since the last publish, or check the count on the workspace’s Publish page.

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Changes land staged

This is the single most useful thing to know about the chat. Every reply ends with one line saying what is staged and what is live, so you never have to guess whether a change is visible to a visitor yet.
A new CMS item is created as a draft (is_draft defaults to true), and an item publish skips anything still marked draft. Ask the chat to clear the draft flag before you ask it to publish, or say so in the same request. Draft also keeps an item out of the next publish; it never unpublishes an item that is already live. To take a live item down, unpublish it.

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When the chat will not start

The composer only mounts once the workspace has a connected site with a site picked, because every turn before that is refused server-side anyway. Until then the pane shows one line and the action that fixes it:
Site details in the workspace — custom domains, locales, the live address, the last publish time — come from a cached row rather than a live read, so every surface says when Hiveku last looked and Settings carries a Refresh from Webflow action. The chat is told the same thing: never state a domain or a locale from the cached snapshot as current.

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Reaching the same operations from your own tools

The chat is one client of the Webflow operation registry, not a special case. The same 110 operations are exposed as MCP tools named webflow_<action>, so an MCP client can drive the site the same way with the same gates and the same error codes. See Hiveku for Claude Code and LLM Connectors for how to connect one, and Webflow for Developers for the operation surface and its error map.

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What’s next

The Webflow workspace

The rail, the panels, the page editor and the publish etiquette the chat obeys.

Webflow automations

The Webflow triggers and action nodes, and a worked recipe from a published item to a social draft and a Slack ping.

Webflow as the content source

Point New Content, the Content department and the CMS panel at Webflow collections.

Webflow for developers

The OAuth model, what is stored, the inbound receiver, the crons, and the full error map.