ATLAS has been Germany's leading safety shoe manufacturer for generations. Simon Meyer and Rozelle Hartzenberg explain how the brand is building for the next one.
Strategically, AI is one of the most important topics for the future. The buying behavior is changing, and we need to make sure we're represented when a new generation of buyers starts looking.
Simon Meyer, Managing Director of ATLAS
A century of brand equity, now translating to AI
ATLAS began in postwar West Germany, producing tools to clean rubble from the streets. As production capacity was rebuilt across the country, the company saw an unmet need in its own line of work: workers in the coal and steel industries lacked protective footwear. ATLAS started making safety shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and the founder drove from production site to production site, selling them to workers.
Today, ATLAS is the leading safety shoe manufacturer in Germany, with more than 400 models covering every category of industrial work. The brand has 115 years of equity behind it, a manufacturing operation centered in Dortmund, a flagship physical store and growing e-commerce channels.
But even a brand that took over a century to build doesn't automatically appear in an LLM's answer.
We sat down with Simon Meyer, ATLAS's Managing Director, and Rozelle Hartzenberg, who leads the company's AI Search efforts, to find out how a 115-year-old market leader is approaching a channel that didn't exist five years ago.
Why a market leader needs to take AI Search seriously
For decades, the buying process for safety shoes has been pretty stable. Industrial buyers procure in bulk, individual workers wear what their employers specify, and brands with the deepest distribution win. A world built for incumbents like ATLAS.
But for B2C buyers like tradespeople, gig workers, and younger professionals who research and purchase their own gear online. When those buyers ask ChatGPT or Gemini, "What are the best safety shoes?" ATLAS isn't always in the answer.
"We're the market leader, but it's not 100% reflected in the AI visibility of the shoes," Simon Meyer, ATLAS's Managing Director, said. "It is important that we now invest our time and resources into building up our B2C presence so that our status as market leader is reflected there. We want to become better positioned in AI Search than we are right now."
A surprising admission from a market leader. Also, a clear-eyed one. The traditional levers of market leadership, such as distribution, brand recognition among industrial buyers, and decades of trust, don't automatically transfer to a channel where decisions are made by an LLM summarizing third-party sources.
Working with Temso to close the gap
Rozelle Hartzenberg leads ATLAS's AI Search efforts. She trialed two other GEO platforms before settling on Temso.
"Temso is just a lot more useful day-to-day," she said. "The other tools were dashboards - they gave you sources in a nice UI, but actually accessing them was a nightmare. Even something as small as exporting data was clunky. Temso's Agent worked through the data and gave us the insights we needed, whereas the dashboards merely gave unfiltered data."
The setup was straightforward, but the part Rozelle credits most is the expert call during onboarding. ATLAS had initially configured a set of branded prompts that flattered the data without measuring what mattered.
"What we actually wanted was to show up in more general queries like what are the best safety shoes? not just queries that already mention our brand. Having that guidance during the initial setup was really useful."
Recalibrating the prompts gave ATLAS a real baseline to work from. Discovery by new buyers, rather than recognition by existing ones.
How ATLAS uses the AI Agent for PR research
ATLAS's most interesting use of Temso’s visibility tracking is PR.
LLMs cite third-party sources such as review sites, comparison guides, trade publications and editorial features when answering category questions. Brands appearing in the right sources end up in AI responses. Source-level intelligence, then, becomes the central question of any PR strategy aimed at AI Search.
Temso's AI Agent identifies which publishers are driving citations across eight LLMs, ranks them by influence, and helps Rozelle dig into each one through a chat interface.
The agent crawls URLs, including ATLAS's own site and the sources cited in LLM responses, so its recommendations are based on what's already on the page and the content gaps to be filled. In Rozelle's words, working with the agent feels less like using a tool and more like having a conversation with an expert who knows the data. Which made the Agent especially useful for outreach.
"For PR outreach specifically, what the AI agent helped a lot with was identifying the sources worth approaching - which ones would actually boost our mention rate or perception, and which were worth our time," Rozelle said. "We used the agent to generate some of the initial outreach. The agent informed the course, and now we're working with a partner to take it further."
Following the citations to new investments
A particularly valuable insight for Simon came from the agent's revelation about comparison websites.
"Interestingly, we found that LLM's cite comparison sites heavily," he explained. Temso's source-level analysis revealed that comparison sites are among the highest-impact channels for AI Search. The agent ranked the sites driving the most citations across eight LLMs and showed ATLAS exactly where to focus next.
“From an AI Search perspective, this is exactly where we need to be investing. Two years from now, we want to be established in this channel - and Temso is the one helping us get there.”
A reliability boost as a side effect
ATLAS's primary focus has been outreach and source-level visibility, but a secondary win is in how LLMs describe the brand. ATLAS's reliability score, one of the brand attributes Temso tracks, has measurably improved.
The improvement came as a byproduct of ATLAS appearing in more credible sources. The right publications cite the brand, the LLMs ingest that signal, and the picture they paint of ATLAS gets more aligned with the picture ATLAS's customers have always had.
"Our perception of being a good brand for safety shoes strengthened across the LLMs”. Rozelle said. “Which I was happy about."
AI Search is now a strategic priority for ATLAS
The customers buying safety shoes today aren't the customers ATLAS needs to win in five years.
"Right now, a lot of our buyers are returning customers. They've bought ATLAS before. They know us, they trust us, and they buy us again. But people new to the market behave differently. Younger workers entering this segment use AI to research. We need to be the answer when they ask."
Rather than using Temso to refine established marketing tactics, Simon and Rozelle rely on it to define their LLM playbook.
"Temso gives us the transparency to monitor it, the inspiration of what to do, and where to adjust," Simon said. "The topic is so big, it's not one thing you change, and everything moves. It's a constant adjustment. The constant inspiration and recommendations for what to do next are what make Temso so valuable."
After a century spent earning the trust of German workers, ATLAS is evolving to ensure its legacy reaches a younger generation and meets them on the new channels they spend time on.
