1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Eugène Ernoult : The company was founded in Paris in 2016 by Augustin Prot and Rémy Berda, who created it to solve a common developer pain point: making websites multilingual. Rémy comes from a developer background and Augustin from finance, so the team teamed up to build a no-code tool that website owners could use without relying on developers.

And to this day, this is a key thing that makes Weglot stand apart from our competitors – the ease of use. Our solution is codeless, integrates with many CMSs and deploys automatically, which is relevant for smaller ecommerce websites that don’t have their own development teams. Weglot also stands out for its extensive language support (over 110 language translations), automatic multilingual SEO, and our human powered customer service.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Eugène Ernoult : Augustin and Remy found early success through an “international by default” mindset, as Weglot’s website and product was built in English from the start to ensure universality. Another key turning point for the company is when they engaged in “uncomfortable” testing, such as paying for Google search ads that directed users to third-party platforms rather than their own website. Although it meant a loss of Weglot’s brand visibility, it increased conversion rates, which was truly important to the early growth of our company.

Lastly, the founders invested in CMS app stores. It was more work for them, but it turned out that these stores were a great distribution channel. They also offer companies a way to benefit from the trust of store users, especially when nobody knows and trusts their platforms on their own.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Eugène Ernoult : Organic search has been our most consistent growth engine since the early days. We invested early in SEO — both on our own blog and across CMS marketplaces like the WordPress Plugin Directory and the Shopify App Store — and it continues to drive a large share of our signups. The key lesson there is that distribution through ecosystems compounds over time: showing up where developers and agencies are already looking is more efficient than trying to pull them to you.

More recently, we’ve extended that work into GEO — generative engine optimization, or how you show up in AI-generated search results. We ran a study (https://www.weglot.com/blog/multilingual-seo-ai-visibility) analyzing over 1.3 million citations across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and what we found shaped how we now approach content. Translated sites get cited significantly more often by AI systems — in some cases up to 327% more. That’s something we’ve built into our own strategy too. Concretely, we added LLM visibility tracking alongside traditional ranking metrics, adapted our content to be more citable (cleaner structure, authoritative sourcing, named concepts), and invested in getting the Weglot brand mentioned beyond our own site — in partner content, press, and community spaces. We’re currently the most visible brand on LLMs in our category, and we treat that as seriously as any organic ranking.

The second major channel is our partner network — web agencies and freelancers who build multilingual sites for their clients. This is a referral-driven, relationship-based channel that takes longer to build but produces very high-quality customers. In a category where trust and ease of implementation matter, having an expert recommend you in context is hard to replicate with paid acquisition alone.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Eugène Ernoult : Like many companies, we’re seeing the rise of AI-driven search, with GEO as a major evolution of SEO. The underlying principle, however, is the same: provide high-quality, unique, trustworthy content so that both search engines and/or AI systems reference your ecommerce site as a credible product source for your category. For Weglot, this has meant building a content program that treats AI search visibility as a first-class metric alongside traditional organic traffic.

Practically, we’ve added LLM visibility tracking (https://www.weglot.com/multilingual-geo-hub) alongside traditional ranking metrics, we’ve adapted how we structure content so it’s more citable (clear answers, named concepts, authoritative sourcing), and we’re investing in getting the Weglot brand mentioned beyond our own site — in partner content, press, and community spaces. The principles haven’t changed. The measurement has.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Eugène Ernoult : Retention of new customers is more important than ever, especially as we’ve witnessed the online translation market evolve with the rise in AI and the inclusion of more competitors since Weglot started. This is why we have been investing much more intentionally in our brand and community initiatives over the past year, including the launch of an accelerator program, building an event series around international expansion, and recently the creation of our own podcast. The goal isn’t just visibility; it’s building a recognizable point of view and long-term audience trust around the topics we want to be associated with, which in turn resonates with customers and ultimately turns them into advocates.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Eugène Ernoult : Though we are not an ecommerce site, one strategy I’d recommend (depending on the products being sold) is going to market through your ecosystem. For Weglot that means CMS platforms, like WordPress and Shopify on the tech side, and web agencies and freelancers on the service side. Together, they represent a major part of our GTM today and we’ve found that It’s a channel that’s genuinely underused by a lot of companies. When it works, it creates distribution you couldn’t build alone.

As for a strategy I would stop doing, it’s treating localization as a final step in the go-to-market process — something you bolt on once the English version is “done.” We see this pattern a lot and it almost always results in a translated site that doesn’t convert. The language is there, but the trust signals aren’t: the pricing still reads as foreign, the payment methods don’t match local expectations, the customer reviews are all in English. You end up with traffic you can’t close.

The smarter approach is to build for localization from the start, even if you only launch in one additional language initially. Think about which pages drive conversion, not just which pages drive traffic, and localize those first with full attention to cultural fit, not just linguistic accuracy. This is what we call “conversion-ready” localization: the difference between a site that has been translated and a site that a local customer actually trusts enough to buy from. The companies that grow internationally tend to be the ones that stopped thinking of translation as a cost and started treating it as a conversion investment. Weglot is the tool that helps ecommerce teams get there: translating, displaying, and managing multilingual websites without relying on developers.