Hikoo on BFM Business, or how to become the brand AI recommends

The full segment is available on the BFM Business site, in the Le Pitch section of Good Morning Business. It is in French.

Watch the segment on BFM Business

The replay is hosted by BFM Business, so the video opens on bfmtv.com in a new tab.

A growing share of questions now ends in a generated answer: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Mistral or Google AI Overviews. That answer names two or three brands. The rest appear nowhere.

Hikoo queries the main generative engines every day on the questions buyers in a market actually ask, then records who gets cited, in what position, with what sentiment and from which sources.

Every citation traces back to specific pages and sources. Hikoo ranks them, flags the ones feeding competitors, and turns the diagnosis into a plan: content to write, pages to fix, sources to go after.

What four minutes on air leaves out, spelled out here.

• What is GEO exactly?

  Generative Engine Optimization covers everything that gets a brand cited in answers from generative AI. Same logic as SEO, except the results page is replaced by a single answer that names only a handful of players.

• Why is this happening now?

  Because the journey is shifting. Assistants answer directly, users click less, and the decision happens inside the answer itself. A brand missing from that answer drops out of part of the buying journey with nothing in its analytics to show for it.

• How do you know whether AI cites a brand?

  By asking the questions customers ask, every day, on every engine. That is what Hikoo does. It runs a set of prompts per brand daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Mistral, Grok and Google's AI surfaces, and keeps the full citation history.

• What makes an AI cite one brand over another?

  Sources. A model answering with search leans on the pages it treats as reliable: the brand's own site, but above all the comparisons, directories, forums and media that talk about it. Working on AI visibility means working on those sources as much as on your own pages.

• Does this make SEO useless?

  No. Generative engines lean heavily on the web index and on the same trust signals. A site a crawler cannot read is a site an AI cannot read. GEO adds one more layer, which is how content gets quoted, summarised and recomposed inside an answer.

• Where do you start?

  With a baseline. The free Hikoo audit analyses a site, checks AI crawler access and shows what the engines understand about the brand. No signup, no credit card.

• Who is behind Hikoo?

  Hikoo is a French AI visibility platform founded by Gabriel Toledano (CEO) and Timothé Merle (CTO), the guest on Le Pitch. The team works with brands, agencies and marketing teams that want to measure and then improve their presence in AI answers.