How L'Occitane boosts its digital visibility in the age of AI

L'Occitane en Provence faced heavy reliance on paid investment, particularly for branded keywords. To take back control of its visibility, the brand needed to rebalance its acquisition channels.

The project ran into classic obstacles: limited SEO resources, and a strong dependence on IT that slowed execution. On top of that came significant technical complexity, particularly around JavaScript, which limits the ability of search engines — and AI — to read and interpret content. At the same time, the rise of AI assistants was fragmenting traffic. The challenge became twofold: grow visibility on traditional search engines while establishing a presence in these new conversational environments.

The brand needed a solution capable of handling fast technical execution across 22 markets, backed by deep traditional SEO expertise, while also positioning the brand for the new era of AI search.

L'Occitane chose Botify to build a unified strategy powered by a single SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform. The collaboration began with an audit of the brand's technical foundations: identifying roadblocks and prioritizing next steps.

With PageWorkers, the teams deployed 31 actions into production without involving IT. Some were structural — category pages, metadata, internal links. Others were seasonal. Together, they closed the technical gap and picked up the pace.

Working alongside L'Occitane's IT teams, Botify set up clear governance: anything that needs to move fast goes through PageWorkers; anything structural goes through IT's cycles. A Black Friday promotion can go live in a matter of days; an overhaul of the international site architecture goes through IT, with Botify safeguarding performance along the way. Botify also helped recruit a dedicated SEO resource — a sign of a long-term partnership.

What sets this setup apart: Botify works directly with IT teams, not just marketing — fewer back-and-forths, less technical debt, and secured revenue.

"What's valuable with Botify is that we can deploy quick wins in a very agile way. But when something is more structural, Botify can also integrate with our IT teams for a fast, effective resolution, so we don't build up technical debt." — Dorian Candavoine, E-commerce Director EMEA, L'Occitane en Provence

At the same time, L'Occitane restructured its content to make it readable by AI, deploying more than 300 FAQ modules in structured data across the site's pages via PageWorkers.

With Botify AI Visibility, the brand now analyzes more than 5,000 prompts a week, across 14 campaigns covering brand awareness and product-line performance, tested across multiple LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — and multiple markets.

These analyses measure both the brand's presence in AI answers and how it's described. One telling example: for hair care queries, ChatGPT and Google AI mentioned L'Occitane but recommended products outside the category (a body care product, for instance), while competitors pointed shoppers to the right product pages. L'Occitane restructured its content accordingly.

Visibility alone is no longer the goal. By analyzing the sentiment of AI-generated answers — positive, neutral, or negative — L'Occitane actively manages how its brand is perceived.

The numbers confirm this lead: across AI-generated answers, the brand earns 73% positive mentions, and just 1% negative. On the product side, L'Occitane gets 92% positive mentions against its five key competitors, and appears in 87% of prompts that generate a product recommendation — a strong signal of authority in AI answers.

This analysis also revealed that customer reviews — a key trust signal — were only partially picked up by AI engines, due to technical limitations: inaccessible pagination, robots.txt blocks, and incomplete JavaScript rendering. The result: an incomplete picture of the brand in some AI-generated answers. L'Occitane fixed the accessibility of this content, improving both its visibility and its perception.