Abstract. Wake steering is a technique that optimises the energy production of a wind farm by employing yaw control to misalign upstream turbines with the incoming wind direction. This work highlights the important dependence between wind direction variations and wake steering optimization. The problem is formalized over time as the succession of independent and steady-state yaw control problems. Then, this work proposes a reformulation of each steady-state problem by augmenting the objective function by a new heuristic based on a wind prediction. The heuristic acts as a penalization for the optimization, encouraging solutions that will guarantee future energy production. Finally, a synthetic sensibility analysis of the wind direction variations and wake steering optimization is conducted. Because of the rotational constraints of the turbines, as the magnitude of the wind direction fluctuations increases, the importance of considering wind prediction in a steady-state optimization is empirically demonstrated. The heuristic proposed in this work greatly improves the performance of controllers and compared to a model predictive control (MPC) approach, it does not increase complexity.