Blog
Field notes on GEO, generative AI, and how AI engines are changing the way people discover and choose brands online today.
Earlier articles
Podcast: how brands should speak to AI in order to exist in its answers
A conversation with Cyril Attias on AI, GEO, and how a brand should speak if it wants to show up in conversational engines.
Antoine Heftler
Should You Wait for AI Paid Search to Move Forward?
A month ago, Perplexity dropped advertising. Not out of idealism, but out of calculation. ⤵️
Antoine Heftler
You measure your AI visibility. Then what?
E-commerce traffic from AI jumped 1,200% in six months. The question is no longer "Am I visible?" It is "Am I chosen?"
Antoine Heftler
Antoine Heftler and the TBWA Employer Brand Club
AI is transforming recruitment: why GEO is becoming essential for your employer brand
Antoine Heftler
Beyond GEO: acquisition and conversion
GEO measures a deep shift: the sales funnel is becoming intentional and contextual, not just another marketing acronym for brands.
Antoine Heftler
Monetizing Intent
From banners to social ads, digital marketing interrupted people. AI answers open a different way to meet intent without the interruption.
Antoine Heftler
UCP and agentic commerce: when organic content becomes the invisible infrastructure of e-commerce
With UCP, the organic content of your e-commerce sites becomes the infrastructure of commerce through AI.
Antoine Heftler
The rise of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): toward a unified infrastructure for transactional AI.
Backed by leaders such as General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, and Kenvue, this protocol aims to create the "common language" between AI and e-commerce platforms.
Antoine Heftler
AI paid search (GEA) in 2026: the transition year?
At the start of 2026, LLMs are trying to invent a new kind of paid search, right at the heart of how AI reasons.
Antoine Heftler
GEO and semantic singularity
Recent RAG research shows language models rank sources by semantic richness and by the real information they add, not by volume.
Antoine Heftler
Formula 1 and the Elephant
SearchGPT's near real-time indexing cuts the wait to be seen. Speed without a consistent story is still a dead end for GEO.
Antoine Heftler
Prepare AI integration upstream
Why does AI produce spectacular results in some companies, and almost insignificant ones in others?
Antoine Heftler
Why most GEO tools start in the wrong place
New GEO tools such as the Wix AI Visibility Overview rest on a deceptively simple principle: testing prompts drawn from the content of your site.
Antoine Heftler
The end of text hegemony: with Gemini 3, GEO becomes multimodal
GEO was mostly about text. With Gemini 3, images and other formats start to count in how engines choose a source to cite.
Antoine Heftler
Rebuilding a site without integrating GEO: is it reasonable?
This is no longer a subject you can put off, as a growing number of users settle for the answers AI produces.
Antoine Heftler
Local GEO: Google Brings Gemini into Google Maps
Gemini inside Google Maps shows how local data shapes whether a business is visible and trusted in AI search results today.
Antoine Heftler
Local anchoring, the centrifugal force of GEO
Being listed is not the same as being legitimate. Local anchoring is what turns GEO visibility into a right to be cited.
Antoine Heftler
The 2025 Wharton report on enterprise AI adoption
Companies are adopting AI quickly, but in a deeply uneven way. That is the key message of the 2025 Wharton Human-AI Research report.
Antoine Heftler
Antoine Heftler, guest on Nicolas Guyon's Comptoir IA podcast
On October 25, I was a guest of Nicolas Guyon, founder of Comptoir IA, the reference podcast on artificial intelligence in France.
Antoine Heftler
The battle for context runs through browsers
Yesterday, around 8 p.m. Paris time, OpenAI unveiled its web browser, with ChatGPT built in.
Antoine Heftler
AI models respond to user context more than ever (Yext study)
Yext's study of 6.8 million AI answers: models follow the user's context more than a single generic brand message to the model.
Antoine Heftler
My own site was invisible to AI...
I built a site with Lovable, a platform that lets you create a complete site through "vibe coding" (via prompts), without writing a line of code.
Antoine Heftler
GEO: "Am I Visible?" Only Makes Sense If I Know "Where I Want to Be"
Kantar's Generative Brand Tracking tracks AI answers. Visibility only helps once you know for whom, and when, you want it.
Antoine Heftler
🫧 And the conversational bubble became an ecosystem...
At OpenAI Dev Day, ChatGPT started hosting other apps inside the conversation. The bubble is becoming an ecosystem of its own.
Antoine Heftler
Étienne Klein and the Age of the "Fake": Why AI Pushes Us to Rethink Our Relationship with Truth
At a public summit, Étienne Klein pulls the debate back to the fake AI helps construct, not only the lies it might spread.
Antoine Heftler
LLM bias: when AI perpetuates what the law forbids; the example of Indian castes
Dhiraj Singha, an Indian sociologist from a modest background, uses ChatGPT to optimize an application for a job.
Antoine Heftler
Why AI agents fail to understand your customers in one or two exchanges (and how to fix it)
In retail, a shopper gives you one or two messages. Most AI agents still have to guess intent from that, and they miss the sale.
Antoine Heftler
"Context as a Service": from the product to the benefit, and from the benefit to the context
A retailer exploring Context as a Service: for AI, the occasion of use can often matter more than the product sheet itself.
Antoine Heftler
"Vibe coding" lets you create a site in a few minutes. But is a fast site a visible site?
Vibe coding can ship a site in minutes. A fast build is not the same thing as a site that AI engines can see and cite well.
Antoine Heftler
You know the real-estate mantra: "location, location, location"? For AI, it is: "sources, sources, sources."
Pixtral-12B jumped in accuracy on a narrow set of sources. For AI, the useful mantra is sources, not a bigger model for brands.
Antoine Heftler
AI Must Not Steal the Joy of Writing
For people who write because they cannot paint or photograph, writing is still a free gesture. AI should not take it away.
Antoine Heftler
You're in the Fog? So Is AI...
This summer I had a conversation with a friend who designs information systems for autonomous cars.
Antoine Heftler
What if Roald Dahl had anticipated generative AI as early as 1953?
In The Great Automatic Grammatizator, a young engineer designs a machine capable of writing short stories on an assembly line.
Antoine Heftler
E-commerce traffic from AI engines has exploded. Only the beginning?
Adobe measured a 1,200% jump in e-commerce traffic from AI engines in six months. The more useful signal is the quality of that traffic.
Antoine Heftler
What if public ChatGPT chats became a new lever of visibility and authority for brands online?
You have probably seen several posts about ChatGPT's public conversations — and, in particular, the fact that Google can reach them.
Antoine Heftler
The goals of the Responsible Generative AI Guide
Give brands the means to decide with full awareness, design AI uses aligned with their values, and secure their projects.
Antoine Heftler
GEO, Technique Is Not the Point
These days, a great many tools for measuring visibility in AI are springing up, along with best-practice guides for making content AI-compatible.
Antoine Heftler
Does AI Equal Creativity?
A new wave of AI-generated productions is currently sweeping LinkedIn: the IKEA ads.
Antoine Heftler
Translator, coder, advertiser
What do the relationships of a (good) translator, a (talented) coder, or a (brilliant) advertiser with AI have in common?
Antoine Heftler
A little courage
Another dizzying week of AI announcements. The useful response is a bit of courage, not a new guide promising the first place in every answer.
Antoine Heftler
Rethinking personas in the era of generative artificial intelligence
The notion of the persona is showing its limits: generative AI upends that logic.
Antoine Heftler
The Arrival
Brands built identity on controlled messages. Generative AI unsettles that control, and opens a new way to be described.
Antoine Heftler
What the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can teach us about the language of artificial intelligences
What if the language we speak shapes how we think? Sapir-Whorf, revisited for the way generative AI talks to us and for us.
Antoine Heftler
The AI Act and Marketing Content
On August 1, 2024, the European regulation on artificial intelligence entered into force.
Antoine Heftler
About llms.txt
Proposed by llmstxt.org, this file sits at the root of a website and offers a clear, concise overview.
Antoine Heftler
The State of GEO
Searches via LLMs are still a minority today, but their growth is explosive.
Antoine Heftler
10 GEO/LLMO actions (#9 and #10)
GEO actions 9 and 10: test pages with LLM tools and structured-data checks, then write native versions for each language.
Antoine Heftler
10 GEO actions (#7 and #8)
GEO actions 7 and 8: build campaigns around the questions people ask AI, then measure whether the brand actually comes back.
Antoine Heftler
10 GEO actions (#5 and #6)
GEO actions 5 and 6: keep strategic pages fresh and watch how AI describes the brand, then get your data into the models.
Antoine Heftler
10 GEO actions (#3 and #4)
GEO actions 3 and 4: earn credibility with AI engines, then build the FAQs, glossaries and knowledge hubs they can cite.
Antoine Heftler
10 GEO actions (#1 and #2)
GEO actions 1 and 2: write clear content for language models, then add Schema markup so AI engines can identify the offer.
Antoine Heftler