Pet affiliate marketing and GEO: interview with Matthieu Wolf from Le Parisien

Matthieu Wolf, Le Parisien, head of business development

What role does artificial intelligence (AI) play in your content, seo optimization, or monetization strategies?

The performance and affiliate team at Le Parisien is fully integrated into the digital department, so AI is naturally always part of our strategic thinking.

We already use AI massively for our internal tools and products. For instance, AI helps enrich our CMS with suggestions for titles, keywords, and internal linking. On our website, internal recirculation relies on AI to increase relevance. We have also produced videos with the help of AI to contextualize specific deals.

Have you already adapted your visibility strategies to the era of conversational engines (LLMs, SGE, ChatGPT, Perplexity…)?

Yes, we have already launched visibility campaigns in the home alarm and pet care sectors. This initiative was actually driven by one of our historical advertisers who, using a GEO analysis tool, quickly identified us as the most relevant partner media to support their GEO strategy. We are seeing high demand for our GEO offering to secure visibility for our advertisers on strategic queries.

Which levers or best practices seem most effective today to maximize the ROI of affiliate campaigns?

Consistency. Working on an always-on basis is more effective, and it aligns perfectly with our core business: creating content, delivering qualified traffic, and generating performance.

Regular communication is a key element. Conforama is a great example: a collaboration driving significant revenue volumes, where a recurring publication strategy was implemented during all major retail peaks (sales, Black Friday…). JOTT is another brand that instantly resonated with our audience. From the very first publications, the revenue generated for this brand was substantial.

A final example that is starting to pay off in the pet care category is Zoomalia, with whom we just launched a collaboration mixing evergreen and trending content.

How have the new regulations on influencer marketing transformed your collaborations?

We launched an influencer offer a few months ago across four social networks: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. We collaborate with influencers who highlight the Le Parisien buying guide while preserving our DNA and editorial line. Each creator has their own area of expertise: tech, fashion, beauty, or childcare.

For us, this is a new opportunity to showcase our top deals and product tests through video, allowing us to offer comprehensive 360-degree campaigns.

How do you balance transparency, creativity, and performance?

Transparency has always been in our DNA. When it comes to deals, it has to be a genuine bargain for us to accept it and share it with our readers. Our audience is loyal and engaged. Also, mastering the entire value chain—content managers, developers, product managers, sales teams—makes us far more efficient.

Creativity requires constant market monitoring. As a media outlet, we must follow trends, analyze them, and create content around them, while also tracking market shifts and new video formats, all while surrounding ourselves with creative profiles whose job is to talk to communities.

Performance is our ultimate judge. a partner for whom we generate performance becomes a loyal partner. The performance of our setups is monitored daily, which is the key to a campaign’s success. In fact, 90% of our advertisers renew their contracts from one year to the next.

What mistakes or misconceptions do you still see from brands? What advice would you give to avoid them?

As a leader and pioneer of content to commerce among mainstream media, our role is to understand the challenges of each partner and guide them in generating performance (sales, leads, traffic, branding…). The content to commerce lever is an excellent contributor, but it is too often compared to lower-funnel levers like cashback or promo codes, even though they do not share the same objective. This is where the role of experts is key: to explain, support, and prove value.

Content to commerce is also an excellent lever for recruiting new buyers who are not yet familiar with a brand. While they are harder to convince initially, they become regular buyers once onboarded. This lever should therefore be managed like a traditional media campaign: consistency is what unlocks attractive ROIs.

Another mistake is looking solely at which lever claimed the final sale, forgetting the most relevant KPI in content to commerce: contribution.

What emerging trends do you observe for 2026 in your ecosystem?

Content to commerce is growing, which is positive, especially in a context where certain traditional affiliate sectors, like promo codes, face significant challenges.

The Le Parisien buying guide is growing for the eighth consecutive year in terms of both audience and revenue. This growth is driven by categories that have significantly strengthened recently. This is why we are heavily investing in pet affiliate marketing. We started by covering dog food topics, then pet insurance, and more recently, we have produced content around dog training.

The newest frontier is GEO. Our commercial offer has already launched, and we now possess the tools to monitor our share of voice on LLMs.

In your opinion, what are the advantages of collaborating with a platform like Affilae?

You have wonderful brands that appeal to our readers, such as Conforama, Tediber, and JOTT.

We share an excellent relationship. To build an effective campaign, you need performance, trust, and reactivity.

The real bonus today is the mindset of the teams. The personal connection is excellent, and account managers are highly responsive. We notice the improvement year after year. Trust is deepening, which makes communication seamless. Business relationships are just as essential as performance, and yours is excellent.

What will be your highlights or major projects for the next 12 months?

By the summer of 2026, we will host our third edition of the content to commerce observatory. During the previous edition last November, we brought together over a hundred market decision-makers (agences, advertisers, publishers) to present a study on French consumers and Black Friday, followed by two round tables featuring affiliate marketing experts.