GEO strategy case study: what really worked in six months at Crealo.

According to Apolline Perivier, marketing manager at Crealo, what worked after six months of GEO was useful editorial content, an About page written for language models and press coverage in specialist media. Social networks other than LinkedIn had no visible effect on AI citations, and traffic from LLMs grew by 80% over the period.

Crealo sells royalty management software to publishing houses, a niche B2B market. At The Shift 01, the SEO and GEO event held on 14 September 2026, Apolline Perivier presented the six actions her team tested: what worked, what surprised them and what did not. This GEO strategy case study summarises her talk.

The slides of the talk are available as a PDF, and you can learn more about the product on the Crealo website.

01Why Crealo started a GEO strategy

Crealo is software that manages author royalties for publishing houses. It operates notably in France, the United Kingdom and Canada and has more than 200 clients. According to Apolline Perivier, 45% of its inbound leads come from SEO.

The trigger came from sales calls. Prospects in demos said they had found Crealo on ChatGPT. The team decided to launch a GEO strategy over six months (GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is explained in our GEO glossary entry).

The first step was monitoring: specialist media, agency webinars, newsletters, discussions with experts (including Roland Vekemans from BeBranded) and tests of GEO audit tools. Apolline Perivier explains that only one tool, Qwairy, gave results close to their Google Analytics data, with their competitors cited.

From there, Crealo set three goals:

• make sure LLMs understand what Crealo is;
• be present on channels other than its own website;
• publish content that is useful for readers and also usable by LLMs.

02Action 1: ask four AIs the same question every month

Every month, the team asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude the same question, in French and in English, in private browsing: "I am a publishing house and I am looking for software to generate my royalty statements, what do you recommend?" The answers are logged in a document, month after month.

This simple routine revealed a concrete problem. According to Apolline Perivier, Claude stated a price of 20 euros a month for Crealo, confusing it with a Spanish software product with the same name. Publishing detailed offer pages corrected the answer.

The lesson is practical. Before producing content, you need to know what AIs already say about your brand, and where they get it wrong.

03Action 2: an About page written for LLMs

Crealo published an About page designed for language models. Its structure, shown on the slides, follows seven blocks:

1. key figures that are easy to reuse;
2. what Crealo is;
3. who it is for;
4. which problem it solves;
5. its services, with a link;
6. the countries where it operates;
7. its integrations with business tools.

The page gets little traffic. The slides show 109 views on the English version, 79 on the French version, and more than 1% of total LLM traffic. But Apolline Perivier observed a real change in AI answers after it went live. The team updates it each time a new service launches.

04Action 3: content that AIs can use

The third action concerns the blog. Crealo's articles now follow a few rules:

• a summary at the top that answers the search intent clearly;
• summary tables and lists of key points that are easy to quote;
• original figures, from research carried out with publishers' associations;
• content that is not generated by AI;
• a business glossary on copyright and royalty statements.

The clearest example is a neutral comparison article, "How to choose the best royalty management software". According to Apolline Perivier, it ranks third on the query "royalty management software", a position the home page never reached. It is also cited by AIs, notably in the United States.

05Action 4: other social networks

Crealo increased its presence on several networks: LinkedIn, X in English, Facebook in French and YouTube, including videos in Spanish. Apolline Perivier's conclusion is direct. LinkedIn remains the most useful channel, and the other networks had no visible effect on AI citations.

06Action 5: press relations and sponsored articles

The team targeted specialist media in its priority markets: the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The slides show articles in The Bookseller and Publishers Weekly, labelled as sponsored or promotional content. Crealo chose the wording of these articles.

According to Apolline Perivier, this action had a real impact, particularly on the sources cited by Perplexity.

07Action 6: international GEO, starting with Canada

For Canada, Crealo created a dedicated page focused on compliance with Quebec's Law 25. It also published a simple article listing the book fairs in Canada in 2026. According to Apolline Perivier, that article became the page that performs best with LLMs.

The slides add that it gets twice as many LLM views as all the other Canada pages combined (GA4 data). They draw a clear lesson: LLM visibility comes more from editorial content than from the country page itself.

08Six actions, six effects: the summary table

09The results after six months

Apolline Perivier shared the following figures:

• +80% traffic from LLMs;
• 63% of that traffic comes from ChatGPT;
• Claude's share is growing, with a demo booked through Claude the week before the talk;
• 75% of the demos booked through AIs come to a successful conclusion, and several clients have signed.

Three findings stood out. Blog articles are cited far more often than sales pages or the home page. English content is cited more too. And AIs readily cite content about AI.

10What surprised the team

Several results ran against intuition. In Canada, the page with the most effect on LLMs was not the country page but a simple list of book fairs. The About page brought little traffic but changed the answers. And the home page, often the centre of SEO work, plays a small role in AI citations compared with blog articles.

11What did not work, and the open questions

Social networks other than LinkedIn showed no visible effect on citations. Apolline Perivier also listed questions the team has not settled:

• Which tracking tool? There is no equivalent of Search Console for LLMs. The team observes, waits and tests, without knowing search volumes on AIs.
• Reddit or not? Crealo set Reddit aside: few conversations on its topic and a risk of being flagged.
• AI Overview: for now, she sees traffic stagnating rather than falling.

12What to take from this GEO strategy case study

Crealo's experience shows that a niche B2B brand can influence what AIs say about it with simple actions it can track. Four habits come out of the talk: check AI answers regularly, give AIs a clear description of the brand, publish useful editorial content, and get covered by trade media.

You can watch all the talks from the event on our videos page.

13BeBranded's role with Crealo

BeBranded rebuilt Crealo's website and continues to support the team. On GEO, BeBranded provided Apolline Perivier with the SEO and GEO data she used to decide which content to produce, took charge of the whole technical side of the site and advised her. The content and the actions presented in this talk are those of the Crealo team. To see the website project, read the Crealo case study.

14How BeBranded approaches GEO

BeBranded is an agency that works on SEO and GEO, builds custom websites, and develops automation and AI projects. On GEO, we start from data: what AIs say about a brand today, which pages they cite and which content is missing. We then handle the technical side of the site and help the team decide which content to produce, as we did with Crealo. BeBranded co-organised The Shift with Paloma Agency and initWeb to share field experience like this one. To find out more, see our GEO and AI visibility service.