How Luxury Brands Can Approach GEO Without Losing Their Authenticity
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
We have all heard the spiel: if you don’t prepare for AI Marketing you will be left behind! And yes, it seems this has some truth. But what do you do if you don’t want to dumb down your content just so AI bots can crawl it, but you still want to drive digital performance?
You would be forgiven for thinking that, if you spent any time on LinkedIn in 2026, the only way to improve your website’s digital performance is to re-write everything for AI. We are being told that one-line paragraphs and overly simplified sentences are necessary, while any complex grammar, developed thinking or exploratory lines of thought, or heaven forbid, c r e a t i v i t y, is not enough.
While I cannot (sadly) assure you that AI should be ignored, at least from a digital channel perspective, I can offer a more nuanced and considered framework for incorporating AI into your marketing strategy that aligns much more effectively with a brand-led approach.
AI Marketing, or Generative Engine Optimisation, as a channel is developing rapidly, and consequently, so is the advice. You can tie yourself in knots trying to follow the recommendations of these ‘experts’, yet, as with all rapidly developing practices, things change quicker than you can implement them. So here I will aim to outline what is worth investing your resources in, and what is best to ignore (at least for now).
Why GEO Is Becoming Unavoidably Important
Whether we like it or not, a rapidly growing portion of the global population are using AI, or LLMs (Large Language Models, as in your ChatGPTs or your Claudes) to inform purchases, research travel options and even make important life and business decisions. As trust in these models grows, people are taking their recommendations without questioning or cross-referencing the information they are given. So, notably for brand visibility, if any LLM responses to a shopping query misidentify, misrepresent, or even miss you out entirely, users may not even realise.
According to Mckinsey, “About 50 percent of Google searches already have AI summaries, a figure expected to rise to more than 75 percent by 2028, according to trend analysis. Half of consumers polled in a McKinsey survey now intentionally seek out AI-powered search engines, with a majority of users saying it’s the top digital source they use to make buying decisions.”
The findings go on to outline that “Already, 44 percent of AI-powered search users say it’s their primary and preferred source of insight, topping traditional search (31 percent), retailer or brand websites (9 percent), and review sites (6 percent).”
This means that GEO is already challenging what we would call ‘traditional search’ (i.e., Googling something), and that a very significant volume of your target audience is likely using AI agents to browse the internet, research and shop. So, if you are absent from those answers, you will be missing out on their traffic and, therefore, revenue. Not to mention brand visibility and the market share this then gives to your competitors.
The Impact Of GEO On Luxury Brands In Particular
For luxury and fashion brands especially, there are different considerations when it comes to AI Marketing. Luxury branding is most often built on the subtleties and emotion created through intentional decisions around typography, imagery and, often, what is not said. AI bots do not reliably understand these cues, unless explicitly directed.
Recent research from the Harvard Business Review explains that “AI systems are prone to misinterpreting and mischaracterizing brand attributes. And their struggle to read the implicit cues leveraged to create desirability—scarcity, heritage, association with art, and even product shape—result in weaker visibility in search.”
Despite AI’s rather alarming dismissal of what is collectively centuries of luxury brand artisanship and emphasis on creativity, by not conforming, brands run the risk of being misrepresented, or even ignored. But for luxury and creative-led businesses, such as fashion brands, where this reliance on implicit cues to convey exclusivity does not work with AI systems, what are you supposed to do?
How To Market Luxury For AI
So, I come back to my original question: what do you do if you do not want to rewrite your content to suit AI bots but still want to drive organic traffic?
My answer is (mostly) four-fold:
1. Reporting: Understand Where Your Brand Is Already Visible
Monitoring your traffic acquisition report is essential for any digital strategy, but understanding where your brand is already visible from an LLM perspective is probably the most important starting point. Reviewing where your brand is already showing up, and where it is not - and understanding why - can fuel the beginnings of your strategy.
There are a number of AI reporting platforms claiming to be able to solve all your citation visibility problems, but the jury is still out on not only the effectiveness of this – with so many different LLM models working in so many different ways - but also the value. Consistently monitoring traffic and visibility across GA, GSC, and if you have an existing SEO tool such as Ahrefs, will give you an idea of what is happening and areas you can strengthen before you decide how much more you want to invest.
2. Fix Any Technical Issues
This is not particularly sexy, I’ll admit, but it is hugely important for both SEO and GEO. Plus, other than improving the user experience, these changes will not even be visible to customers, so it is a really easy win for luxury and image-conscious brands.
Structured data comes under this technical umbrella. Structured data, also referred to as schema markup, is essentially information (namely code) added to web pages to help associate them with a set of properties. Schema.org outlines the categories, or ‘types’, which include things such as CreativeWork through to Product, Organisation or Place. These categorisations help machines (so LLMs, or Google) better understand what these pages are offering. There is no guarantee that this will win you citations, but it does simplify the process of communicating with these AI platforms, which is a start.
Improving the speed at which your website loads is also hugely valuable to its performance for both SEO, and now GEO. Largely speaking, many AI systems are far behind Google’s crawling capacity at this point, which is why they often rely on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as a list of pre-vetted websites to pull from - it saves them time and resource (read: money).
Similarly, their understanding of how a page is constructed is far behind that of Google’s. As technical SEO expert, Jono Alderson explains:
“If an AI agent finds only an empty page, a URL returning the wrong HTTP status, or a tangled mess of markup, it will not see or understand your content. It may misinterpret you, ignore you, or recommend a competitor instead. If your site relies heavily on client-side rendering, the agent may find nothing at all.
Alderson goes on to point out that this is not just about visibility either, outlining how a lot of today’s overly complicated page set-ups with large images or excessive JavaScript ‘ makes your site expensive, brittle, and a nightmare for lightweight systems [i.e. AI Agents] to crawl.”
So, speak to your web developer about any of the above, and any bugs that you may have been ignoring in your SEO tool for the last few months. Even fixing broken internal links, incorrect redirects, dead links, or unnecessary 404 pages will help the way both users and crawlers move through the site.
3. Strengthen Your SEO – in-line with your brand strategy
I have written at length about how SEO does not have to be ugly, and I specialise in balancing the grittier parts of SEO requirements with the needs of the creative and editorial teams, so I am biased on the value in this. But using the point above, as LLMs (some more than others) are still relying on search results to discover websites, your website’s performance in search is still integral for visibility on AI systems.
Creating user-friendly and keyword-led taxonomy structures alongside a brand-led content strategy will pay dividends in building your site’s relevance to search queries and prompts alike.
Explicit naming conventions have been prioritised by SEO teams for years - with clever ones integrating this with the brand strategy to incorporate a discoverable but authentic tone of voice. Focusing on this approach across priority pages helps remove some of the more implicit cues typical of luxury brands, and prioritise discoverability, without compromising your brand identity. Plus, as I like to point out to my clients, something as valuable as meta data is not client-facing anyway, so there is no reason not to start there.
3.1 Content Strategy
When it comes to your content strategy, I always recommend integrating it closely with any organic search considerations as it is invaluable for SEO and AI marketing alike. The principles behind E-E-A-T, Google’s search quality concept, are particularly useful when planning how to highlight a brand’s authority in a way that actually does resonate with users.
Structuring your content strategy with an SEO perspective automatically ensures your message is accessible and, unless your audience are bots, there is no need to speak in over-simplified, keyword-heavy language. What engages and resonates with your audience should remain what qualifies your content, not what might get you a quick uptick of traffic as a way to win at GEO.
4. Make Digital PR A Priority
LLMs discover your brand from a variety of different sources, and a significant percentage of this is not from your own site. From UGC to social media, reviews and community-based platforms such as Reddit, AI models assemble an idea of your brand from what other sources are saying about it.
In a Bain & Company AI survey, it was found that in unbranded LLM prompts, third-party web content captured the vast majority of citations. Official brand domains accounted for only 10% of cited sources for watch queries and 45% for jewellery.
As we have already established, this external influence can be hugely concerning for luxury fashion and lifestyle brands that have prioritised communicating their identity in a particular way. So this is where digital PR as a brand management tool becomes essential.
Ensuring visibility in relevant publications to build identity by association, and influencing the ecosystems your brand is interpreted in, will encourage consistency with the message you want to convey, while reinforcing your brand identity in more ways than you can through just owned content.
Planning campaigns with a multi-channel view from the outset therefore becomes far more effective in broadening the touchpoints you are able to reach. Not only does this encourage wider visibility, but it should generate multiple, credible and consistent references to the brand across the places AI systems reference to construct answers. We are now thinking in terms of a holistic digital landscape with a far broader range of touchpoints than just SEO and PR, but the principles of both of these channels are vital in terms of reiterating brand visibility in the age of GEO.
Finally, my last piece of advice is not to panic, and not to change anything too quickly. The adoption of AI requires a considerable amount of discernment, not only of the tools and models, but also the advice surrounding them.
What much of the ‘how to win at GEO’ advice overlooks is that some people – people! – still read websites, and buy from them. For those customers, a website stripped of any personality and written for robots will do more damage to the brand than strengthen it. The unrelenting AI focus on efficiency and productivity takes away a huge driving force in how and why users (humans) are browsing the internet.
Therefore, the answer is not to make luxury brands generic just to be AI-ready, but to ensure the qualities that make them distinctive are more discoverable through a clear taxonomy, strong technical foundations, and authentic, authoritative content. Paired with a careful and consistent digital PR strategy, this approach can build a strong, holistic digital presence that LLMs can understand, without compromising a brand's authenticity.
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING:
Comments