Every few months, someone declares SEO dead. This year’s culprit: AI assistants. Why optimize for Google when your customers are asking ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity instead? Here’s the uncomfortable truth for the eulogists: those AI assistants learned everything they know from content that was findable, crawlable and well-structured. In other words — from content that did its SEO homework.

Search didn’t die. It multiplied.

The numbers tell a story of addition, not replacement. According to Bain & Company, around 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches — and roughly 60% of searches end without a single click to a website. Meanwhile, Salesforce’s global Shoppers Report finds that 39% of shoppers across 21 countries already use AI for product discovery.

Users haven’t stopped searching. They’ve started searching in more places: classic search engines, AI assistants, social platforms, app stores. Each channel rewards the same underlying qualities — clarity, structure, authority, relevance to the actual question being asked.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) isn’t a replacement for SEO. It’s SEO’s demanding younger sibling. A generative engine can’t cite your product documentation if that documentation is vague, unstructured or invisible. The fundamentals compound.

”Everyone speaks English” — do they buy in English?

Before we even get to how French users search, there’s the question of what language they’ll act on. Two data points worth pinning to your growth team’s wall:

In CSA Research’s landmark “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” survey of 8,709 consumers across 29 countries, 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their native language — and 40% will never buy from a website in another language. Not “reluctantly buy”. Never.

France sits 38th out of 123 countries in the EF English Proficiency Index 2025 — an improvement on previous years, but still far behind the Netherlands, Germany or the Nordics. Betting your French pipeline on English-language content means betting against your own market data.

What this means when you enter the French market

This is where it gets interesting for SaaS teams, because most of them get French SEO wrong in the same three ways:

They translate keywords instead of researching them. The French don’t search for word-for-word translations of English queries. Search intent is cultural: the questions themselves are different, not just the vocabulary.
They optimize the blog and forget the product. Landing pages, help centers and comparison pages carry enormous search weight in French, a market where users research thoroughly before trusting a foreign tool.
They ignore the answer engines. If roughly four in ten shoppers already lean on AI for discovery, and most searches end without a click, then being cited in the answer matters as much as ranking. Content that isn’t structured around questions and direct, citable answers simply doesn’t exist in those responses.

I’ve reviewed enough localization briefs to say this plainly: most of them still describe the 2015 job. “Translate these 30 blog posts, keep the keywords.” The brief that actually moves a French pipeline looks different — it starts with French search intent and works backwards.

The localization angle

None of this is a tooling problem. It’s a linguistic judgment problem. Deciding how a French buyer phrases their pain point, which terminology your product should own in French, whether a page should answer « c’est quoi » or « comment choisir ». These are expert decisions, made query by query.

That’s why “SEO translation” as a mechanical task deserved to die. What replaces it isn’t nothing, it’s search-informed localization: content adapted for how French users actually search, wherever they search.

SEO is not dead. Lazy SEO is. And in a market where 40% of buyers won’t purchase in a foreign language, that’s excellent news for anyone willing to do it properly.

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Entering the French market and wondering what your content is missing? Let’s talk.