This report presents the findings of 2A Agency's independent semantic audit of Asphalte, conducted across 4 large language models in March 2026 (Perplexity Pro, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT Free, Grok). The audit evaluates factual accuracy, identity completeness, founder attribution, and brand positioning as represented in LLM outputs.
Asphalte achieves 82/100 — the highest score of all 2A Agency audits to date. The brand is well-known and accurately represented across all major LLMs on positioning, products, and fabrication. One targeted drift: founder attribution in Gemini and ChatGPT. As Shopify Agentic Storefronts scale, accurate founding data is material for brand authority signals.
Rodolphe Gardies is described as co-founder by Gemini Pro and ChatGPT Free. Public company records (Infogreffe) confirm William Hauvette as the sole founding director. Gardies' role is Chief Brand Officer. In 2 of 4 tested LLMs, the founding of Asphalte is incorrectly attributed.
Business Impact: As AI-powered retail assistants, personal shoppers, and brand recommendation engines scale, incorrect founder attribution erodes brand authority and creates legal ambiguity. For a direct-to-consumer brand whose legitimacy rests on its founding story, this is a material risk in the agentic search era.
| Attribute | Certified Value | LLM Status |
|---|---|---|
| Brand Name | Asphalte | ✓ Accurate |
| Founding Year | 2016 | ✓ Accurate |
| Founding Location | Bordeaux, France | ✓ Accurate |
| Founding Director | William Hauvette (source: Infogreffe) | ✗ Drift in 2/4 LLMs |
| Chief Brand Officer | Rodolphe Gardies (not a co-founder) | ⚠ Misattributed as co-founder |
| Brand Identity | Direct-to-consumer menswear, made-to-order model | ✓ Accurate |
| Positioning | Premium quality, transparent pricing, no intermediaries | ✓ Accurate |
| Fabrication | European manufacturing, quality materials sourcing | ✓ Accurate |
Publish a structured founder record in your llms.txt manifest and brand.json with William Hauvette's role and Infogreffe reference number. This is the most direct action available to brand teams today.
Publish a clear org chart or About page that explicitly names William Hauvette as founder and Rodolphe Gardies as Chief Brand Officer, with machine-readable structured data (JSON-LD Person schema).
A certified 2A registry node provides a machine-readable, third-party attested source of truth that LLMs can rely on during inference — eliminating the founder attribution gap at scale.
The LLM landscape changes with every training cycle. Quarterly re-audits ensure new model versions incorporate your certified facts and detect new drift vectors before they compound.