French media groups turn GEO into a product: who sells what, and at what price

French media groups are turning generative engine optimization (GEO) into a new revenue line. GEO aims to make brands more visible in the answers large language models give. With display revenue eroding, several publishers see a new way to monetize their editorial authority and their content production know-how. Here is what 366, Les Echos-Le Parisien Paris Match Médias, media.Figaro, M Publicité, Reworld Media and Prisma Media have built.

366, the ad sales arm of France's regional press, started doing GEO during the first quarter of 2026. It first answered one-off advertiser briefs, then gradually packaged a more structured offer.

The company bills itself as "the ad sales expert for France's regions," and its approach follows its portfolio: local media. It started with shopping and tourism, two areas where its publishers have strong credibility and produce a lot of content, including guides and supplements.

366 also flags a point that matters in GEO. Publishers have to open their content to LLM crawlers. Without that, the company says, there is little hope of showing up in generative AI answers.

What's in the offer

366's GEO offer runs in stages: an initial audit, a list of strategic queries, a selection of the most relevant media, GEO-friendly content, then ongoing measurement and optimization. Most competitors sell the same steps.

The ad sales arm leans hard on structured formats that suit how LLMs work: FAQs, comparison tables, explainers and guides. Everything runs only on partner publishers' own sites.

366 ran an audit phase, then picked a single third-party tool for measurement, AI visibility vendor Minddex, so it wouldn't be grading its own homework. It uses Minddex for both audits and performance tracking. The tool also has a content-writing assist, and its output always gets reworked to fit each publisher's guidelines.

The KPIs are fairly standard: mention rate, ranking changes, sentiment score and visibility in AI answers.

Unusually, 366 is very cautious about how reliable GEO metrics are. It points to a market that is still speculative and to how little LLM algorithms reveal.

366's main differentiator is its multi-local footprint. The company argues that its titles' local authority is a real advantage for sectors such as tourism and local retail networks.

The first programs sold ranged from €20,000 to €100,000. The business is still largely experimental. 366 builds each setup ad hoc, sized to the advertiser's budget.

The ad sales arm of French business daily Les Echos and daily newspaper Le Parisien launched its GEO offer, Amplify GEO, in March 2026. It is premium and heavily editorial. Every program is custom-built around the advertiser's own issues.

The offer centers on branded content optimized for generative AI and published on the group's sites. Le Parisien and Les Echos come first. Weekly magazine Paris Match and investing title Investir are next.

Several internal teams run each program: ops, branded content, AI specialists, data and the titles' digital teams. The offer has three parts. It audits the brand's visibility in LLMs, produces GEO-friendly content and measures performance over time, at day 30, day 45 and day 60.

The group still treats GEO as exploratory. The first cases cluster around its titles' strongest topics: luxury, and banking and insurance.

What's in the offer

The content is designed to get picked up by AI in the short, medium and long term, the ad sales arm says. The group sticks to GEO-optimized branded articles and does not work on advertisers' own assets.

It also adds a paid social amplification layer with guaranteed traffic. That keeps the offer tied to traditional media KPIs.

For measurement, the group works with two AI visibility vendors, Minddex and Meikai. The KPIs cover citation rate, mention ranking, share of voice, visits to the content and social media impressions.

Citation rate and article traffic are the most robust indicators for now, according to the group. It also acknowledges that visits coming straight from LLMs are still hard to track.

Pricing starts at €10,000 for one GEO-optimized article, covering creation, distribution, optimization and measurement. The ad sales arm still recommends multi-article programs published at regular intervals, which it says produce longer-lasting effects.

Media.figaro, the ad sales arm of French media group Le Figaro, launched GEO Media in October 2025. It has added to the offer month after month as it learned how LLMs source content and which formats get picked up most in generated answers. Buyers who saw it early should take another look. The scope has grown a lot since.

The offer is a package with a three-month minimum commitment. Editorial strategy and the content itself stay custom.

Le Figaro's branded content agency, 14H, carries much of the work. The offer combines a GEO audit, editorial strategy, content production, editorial infiltration of content that already ranks well and ongoing performance management.

What's in the offer

The group draws on all its titles depending on the vertical. Those include national daily Le Figaro, digital titles Journal du Net, L'Internaute and Comment Ça Marche, and women's and celebrity titles Madame Figaro, Gala and Le Journal des Femmes. Personal finance magazine Le Particulier is in the mix too.

That lets the group claim "massive editorial authority." It points to its output: more than 500 journalists and around 800 pieces of content a day on more than 100 topics.

The offer covers the full GEO chain: a visibility audit on about 50 strategic prompts, an editorial strategy, GEO-friendly production, technical optimization and ongoing measurement.

The group puts particular weight on that tactic: getting brands into content that LLMs already rank well. It sees it as an effective way to push brands up faster in generated answers.

Le Figaro argues that formats work best in combination. Guides, FAQs, comparisons, tables, top lists, interviews and studies all perform particularly well with generative AI, according to the group.

Measurement relies mainly on Meikai, which the group presents as an independent third party that can handle audits, monitoring, reporting and tracking across several LLMs. The group mostly tracks visibility rate, share of voice, competitive ranking and how brands come across in AI answers.

For now, the group considers the most reliable indicators to be the ones tied directly to LLM outputs, such as visibility or citations. Traffic and conversions remain hard to track.

When a brand starts with low visibility, the group sees significant uplifts, of up to 11 visibility points. Brands that are already highly visible gain more gradually. For them, the work mostly shores up their position and dominance.

Pricing starts at around €30,000, audit and measurement included. It is a flat fee that varies with the number of prompts, the volume of content and the duration.

The group says it has already run more than 10 GEO campaigns. Beauty and luxury, banking and insurance, automotive and retail drive most of the demand. Media.figaro now treats GEO as a core lever built into its 360-degree recommendations.

M Publicité, the ad sales arm of the group behind French daily Le Monde, has sold a GEO offer called IA Sandbox since November 2025. It is positioned as fairly premium and selective, with packages that bundle an audit, content production, media distribution and GEO tracking.

The offer mixes packaged products and custom work. Cost depends mainly on the number of articles, with packages of five, 10 or 15 pieces.

The group mainly targets banking, insurance, tourism, culture, luxury, automotive and high tech.

What's in the offer

IA Sandbox has three pillars: a GEO audit, GEO-friendly content production and performance measurement.

The group's main pitch is that it can analyze how often brands appear in ChatGPT when ChatGPT draws on Le Monde content. The goal is to pin down which topics, angles and formats AI picks up most, then steer future editorial production accordingly.

The content then sits in dedicated sections on lemonde.fr and gets promoted across the group's titles and Le Monde's social accounts.

Some groups also work on advertisers' owned assets. Le Monde deliberately sticks to its own media to keep the content editorially consistent and authoritative.

The group uses AI search analytics vendor Profound for part of the audit and monitoring. It adds first-party data from its own AI bot detection tools.

Its KPIs focus on visibility rate, the change in positive and negative mentions, and how much OpenAI's bots crawl the content.

The group remains very focused on ChatGPT. Volumes on other platforms are still too low for robust analysis, in its view.

The offer starts at €50,000, measurement included. That puts IA Sandbox among the most premium GEO offers in France. Two things justify the price. One is Le Monde's editorial authority, since it is by far France's No. 1 news brand by subscribers. The other is its partnerships with AI companies OpenAI and Perplexity, which give the group deterministic data to fine-tune its GEO strategies.

Prisma Media's ad sales arm has officially sold its Content for LLM offer since October 2025, after several months of exploration. Unsurprisingly, the French magazine publisher is one of the most advanced media groups in France on GEO.

Some ad sales teams are still running tests or one-off programs. Prisma says its GEO offer is already productized, with stable methods, plenty of production capacity and a structured sales approach.

The model is hybrid: a standard package that scales up with the advertiser's needs. The base includes a GEO audit and two LLM-optimized articles. The ad sales arm also sells much heavier programs with large content volumes and tracking over time, barometer-style.

Prisma Media covers nearly the entire GEO value chain. The offer combines an audit of LLM visibility, GEO-friendly content production, semantic structuring, technical optimization and ongoing performance monitoring.

The digital and marketing teams at Prisma Media Solutions, the group's ad sales arm, lead the offer. Ops, branded content and several other in-house teams also work on it. Prisma wants GEO built directly into its broader media programs, alongside social activations, print and performance campaigns.

What's in the offer

Prisma Media leans on the depth of its portfolio to cover nearly every sector. Capital covers finance, GEO magazine covers travel, and Passeport Santé and CuisineAZ cover health and food. Télé-Loisirs handles culture, Femme Actuelle beauty, and Harper's Bazaar and The Good Life luxury. The ad sales arm says all its verticals can be activated for GEO.

The ad sales arm puts particular weight on structuring content for generative AI. Prisma considers the best-performing formats to be tightly organized content that models can easily summarize: conversational FAQs, comparison tables, lists, use-case recommendations, summaries and customer reviews.

The group also makes much of the "editorial authority" of legacy media brands. That credibility speeds up how fast generative AI picks up content, Prisma believes. The ad sales arm claims LLMs pick up content published on its brands much faster than content on less authoritative sites.

On the tech side, Prisma partnered with Minddex, which handles audits, monitoring, measurement, reporting and some GEO production tools. The ad sales arm also points to Minddex's ability to work through both APIs and scraping, so it can track performance across several LLMs at once.

Prisma tracks mention rate, brands' average position in answers, competitive positions, the sources AI uses and the sentiment attached to generated answers. Still, the group acknowledges that metrics tied to direct traffic from LLMs remain hard to use reliably.

Prisma is also one of the few ad sales teams to share early numbers publicly. On some beauty campaigns, the group claims gains of up to 16 points in citation rate and 14 places in brand ranking. Some Prisma sources used in AI answers climbed 45 places, the group says.

The group also says LLMs behave very differently. In Prisma's view, Perplexity favors recent, near-real-time content, while Gemini can surface much older sources thanks to a kind of "long memory." ChatGPT sits somewhere between freshness and editorial authority.

Commercially, Prisma is one of the most advanced players in France. The ad sales arm says it has produced about 20 GEO campaigns, and that the business could approach €1 million in revenue in 2026.

The entry ticket is €10,000 for two GEO articles on one or two of the group's brands, audit and measurement included. The average deal currently sits around €20,000. Some programs reach €100,000.

Prisma is also considering always-on offers. The idea is to make GEO a matter of continuous visibility rather than a one-off program.

French digital publisher Reworld Media launched its first GEO offers in September 2025. That makes it, along with Prisma Media, the earliest French media group on the topic.

The group draws on all 80 of its media brands, which it says the main LLMs all index. Its ad sales arm sells the offer for standard media activations. Editorialink, its brand publishing agency, also sells it for white-label content and strategic consulting.

Reworld has also set up a dedicated group-level GEO unit led by Marion Collombat. The group treats GEO as a full ecosystem that blends content, technical optimization, social presence, conversational formats and constant monitoring of generative AI.

What's in the offer

Reworld Media's offer stands out for its range. Some ad sales teams focus mainly on GEO-friendly articles. Reworld also works on forums, product pages, FAQs, comparison tables, videos, podcasts, social platforms and multilingual content.

The group works both on its own media and directly on advertisers' assets. It also claims technical optimization skills covering internal linking, content structure and how pages get indexed in AI environments.

The tech stack sets Reworld apart too. The company says it built its own GEO technology, which can identify strategic prompts, the sources LLMs use and how visibility shifts across personas. Off-the-shelf AI visibility and SEO tools round out the stack, including Profound, PeekAI, MeteorIA, SEMrush and Getmint, which clients can switch on at their request.

The ad sales arm also treats server logs as the source of truth. Reworld considers AI bot crawling one of the most reliable KPIs in the market. Crawls leave a technical trace that helps estimate how content gets used in generated answers.

Performance is tracked several times a day by running the same prompts over and over, so the effect of each optimization shows up quickly. The group says the first results are instant, or at least visible in under 48 hours, since LLM crawlers hit its pages almost in real time.

Commercially, Reworld is one of the most advanced players in France. The group says it has run about 30 GEO campaigns. It reports more than €1.5 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Reworld is targeting €6 million to €7 million in GEO revenue this year, Open Garden understands.

The entry ticket is €30,000, with an average deal of around €50,000.

French digital media group Webedia officially launched its GEO offer in spring 2026 through WBX, its new ad sales arm. The offer is called GEO Orchestration. Its premise is that visibility in answer engines no longer comes from optimized editorial content alone. It comes from a whole set of assets that can feed generative AI models.

The group draws on its entire ecosystem of brands and platforms, including cooking site 750g, movie site AlloCiné and gaming site Jeuxvideo.com. It also uses its video channels, its social communities and Sampleo, its product-testing and consumer-review platform.

WBX leads the offer, with several teams across the group involved. Webedia says its approach goes beyond branded content. It covers content creation, video, open conversations, proof of use and managing visibility in LLMs.

What's in the offer

Webedia's main differentiator is that it sees GEO as orchestration rather than a sponsored content program. Generative AI now draws on a mix of sources – media, videos, creators, consumer reviews, forums and social networks – and visibility strategies have to reflect that, the group argues.

The offer combines several levers: editorial content, YouTube videos, conversations on social platforms, consumer-generated content via Sampleo and optimizations on some advertiser assets.

On the editorial side, Webedia works on formats LLMs tend to favor: FAQs, practical guides, comparisons, tables, lists, explainers and how-to content. The group can also rework existing content, internal linking, information architecture and page readability to make them "LLM-friendly."

Webedia also puts weight on video and proof of use. The group believes video and consumer feedback play a growing role in AI-generated answers. That approach relies on Sampleo's ability to generate consumer reviews and testimonials, and on the group's video assets.

For measurement, Webedia currently relies mainly on Minddex. The tool analyzes citations, mentions, the sources LLMs use, share of voice, brand positioning in answers and the sentiment attached to generated recommendations. The group says it is also building its own tools.

Performance is tracked through audits on prompt sets that reflect user intent. Webedia runs the analysis separately for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. It sees sometimes wide gaps between platforms, depending on the sector and the query.

The offer is still new, but several advertisers have already used it. Webedia sells three tiers. GEO Authority centers on editorial authority. GEO Amplified adds video, conversations and user-generated content. GEO Command Center is designed as ongoing management of AI visibility.

The entry ticket is around €10,000, measurement included. Pricing then scales with content volume, video production and the level of support.