How Decathlon deployed a scalable strategy for SEO and GEO
Key takeaways from the Decathlon x Verbolia masterclass at 1-1 Monaco, March 2026.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Your catalog grows every week. Your shoppers search in Google, then in ChatGPT, then in Copilot. And every new category page still has to fit into a release cycle built for a slower world. At 1-1 Monaco, Loïc Hélias (Global SEO Leader at Decathlon) and Pierre-Olivier Danhaive (CEO of Verbolia) explained how Decathlon built a search strategy that scales across countries, absorbed a 13x jump in catalog size, and now feeds AI engines as well as Google. The headline number: a 95x ROI, annualized over five years.
Decathlon sells online in more than 70 countries. Around 60 full-time SEO specialists work across those markets, and each local team keeps real autonomy. That means very different tech stacks, catalogs and search habits from one country to the next.
Three challenges to solve
- Market autonomy. Perform in every market and share best practices, with little centralization.
- A growth model built on proof. Test in France, then roll out once it works. And before chasing growth, avoid regressions.
- Marketplace expansion. In five years, the marketplace multiplied the catalog by 13. The team needed to create, deploy and measure new categories fast, without waiting on IT release cycles.
A scalable strategy, built step by step
France served as the pilot market, and each new layer was added only once the previous one had proven its value.
- 2021, searchdexing: semi-automated creation of ultra-specific category pages for long-tail queries such as “men’s beginner running shoes”.
- 2024, drive-to-store and expansion: pages optimized for local SEO to bring online searchers into stores.
- 2026, GEO: dynamic FAQ blocks to help AI engines like ChatGPT and Copilot understand and cite the pages.
The rollout beyond France came faster than planned. As Loïc tells it:
“In February 2024, we were struggling in SEO across our nine biggest markets. On category pages, France was the only country that wasn’t losing traffic. Finance called me to ask how that was possible. The answer was Verbolia. Within three weeks, we had signed the other countries.”
Since 2024, Verbolia has expanded to 8 more countries with the Decathlon Group, following the success of its strategy in France. Together, these pages cover the whole funnel: informational pages for awareness, drive-to-store pages for consideration, and transactional pages for purchase.
How Verbolia fits into Decathlon’s stack
Decathlon runs Verbolia on top of its existing site, so the SEO team can move without pulling in core IT resources. With Vpage, they generate landing pages optimized for both search engines and AI answer engines. The result: 70,000 pages created, enough to keep up with a catalog that grew 13x. For Loïc, automation was the only realistic option:
“On a catalog of more than 600,000 products, no human can know every day which pages to create and which to close. The answer isn’t always one more person. We don’t do micro SEO anymore. We do data SEO, and data SEO needs tools.”
The results: SEO, GEO and paid search
- Around 70% of Decathlon’s SEO growth comes from the marketplace integration, made possible by automation
- Vpages drive 10.3% of Decathlon’s SEO traffic in France
- 12.4% of the Decathlon pages cited in Copilot conversations are Vpages (Bing Webmaster Tools data)
- 22,000 ChatGPT conversations influenced per day across Decathlon’s 9 largest markets, measured by visits from ChatGPT’s real-time bot to Vpages
- Black Friday in Belgium: 600 dedicated pages and 10x more SEO visits than in 2023
- Google Ads AI Max campaigns: +11% CTR, as Google often picks hyper-specific Vpages as landing pages
Beating Amazon in SEO takes time, even for a player as big as Decathlon. Loïc started working on it five years ago. On the 15,000 to 16,000 specific queries targeted with Vpages, Decathlon France is only now starting to overtake Amazon, with more pages in Google’s top 10. And the question everyone asks: is it worth the cost? Decathlon’s answer is a 95x ROI, annualized over five years. Loïc added that no other third-party application on the site delivers that return.
Bonus: do FAQs improve GEO visibility?
Decathlon tested one hypothesis: adding FAQs to listing pages improves GEO visibility. Pages were split into three groups: 5,849 pages left unchanged (control), 4,387 pages with user-oriented FAQs, and 4,386 pages with bot-oriented FAQs. Both FAQ groups outperformed the control group. After four weeks on Copilot, user-oriented FAQs lifted citations by 54%, and bot-oriented FAQs by 29%. On ChatGPT, both FAQ groups were used about 5 to 10% more often to answer conversations. The lesson is clear: write for people first. What helps users also helps AI engines.
What this means for your e-commerce
Decathlon’s method is easy to describe: test in one market, prove the value, then scale, without adding work for IT. If AI engines are becoming an entry point for your shoppers, the question is no longer whether to work on GEO. It’s how fast you can deploy pages that Google and AI engines can read, understand and cite. Want to go further? Read the full Decathlon case study, see how Decathlon is expanding its collaboration with Verbolia.
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