GEO : luxury in the Age of AI search

As a Senior Manager at Converteo and a specialist in the luxury industry, Thomas Reveleau-Maréchal helps Marketing and Digital departments of luxury brands transform their operations by defining agentic strategies, optimizing customer journeys in the conversational era, and measuring the business impact of their AI investments.

Key Points

• Loss of control at the first touchpoint: With the rise of conversational AI, luxury brands risk losing control over the customer’s initial interaction. AI agents act as intermediaries, often favoring historically dominant brands and using unvetted third-party sources, which can dilute the brand’s narrative and spread inaccuracies.
• The strategic shift to GEO: To regain control, brands must pivot from traditional SEO to “GEO.” This involves structuring their product data and content specifically for AI consumption, ensuring algorithms can accurately understand and represent their offerings, and thus protecting their brand message.
• Augmented customer service as an opportunity: Beyond being a threat, generative AI offers a major opportunity for luxury. By capturing rich conversational data (motivations, purchase intentions), brands can develop an “augmented” and hyper-personalized customer service, reinforcing the exclusivity and intimate relationship that define the luxury experience.

Digital practices are undergoing a profound transformation. The emergence of conversational artificial intelligence is compelling brands to rethink their online visibility strategy. In luxury, an industry where mastering the narrative is essential, the challenge is no longer to observe, but to adapt to this new reality.

The first customer touchpoint can easily slip from brands’ control

A Gartner study estimates that search query volume on traditional search engines will decrease by 25% by 2026. We are currently transitioning from a world of “searching” for a product in a list of links and on website pages to a world of “receiving” suggestions via a conversational agent. This initial touchpoint is now managed by an algorithmic intermediary over which the luxury Houses currently have little control.

Our recent study on the performance of major luxury houses against models like Gemini or ChatGPT confirms this.

The visibility of these Houses in LLM responses is still heavily tied to their financial valuation, legacy, and media value, rather than the relevance of their current offerings. Artificial intelligence, trained on massive amounts of past data, often favors the “heavyweights” at the expense of more niche Houses.

Furthermore, some of the provided answers lack reliability. They draw from unvetted third-party sources – from news articles to discussion forums – which dilutes the brand’s message, when it doesn’t spread factual errors.

Regaining control through data

Faced with this situation, the solution is not to blame the technology, but to feed it better. Brands have spent two decades optimizing their presence for search algorithms; they must now learn to structure their product data for answer algorithms, create more “GEO-ready” content (functional summaries, FAQ comparisons, etc.), and rethink their PR and influence strategies.

Successfully navigating this transition requires more than just a technical adjustment. It involves creating cross-functional teams that bring together product, marketing, communication, and technical staff to ensure the consistency of all shared information.

Towards an augmented customer service

Beyond the simple matter of reputation, generative artificial intelligence will pave the way for a richer, more intimate, and, paradoxically, more human customer relationship. Every interaction with a conversational agent becomes a valuable source of insights: purchasing motivations and intentions, spontaneously mentioned life events, and more. In the luxury sector, where deep customer knowledge is a strategic imperative, this conversational data is a gold mine. However, it is essential to start preparing today to capture, structure, and intelligently activate it, while respecting the codes of exclusivity and discretion specific to these Houses.

In short, the entire purchasing journey must be redesigned for the age of agents: from inspired discovery to contextualized recommendations, from in-store appointment booking to tailor-made after-sales service.

By acting now, luxury Houses are not just protecting their image and online visibility. They are empowering themselves to reinvent exceptional customer service at scale, without giving up the hyper-personalization that defines their value. Generative AI then becomes not just an additional technological tool, but a strategic lever for differentiation, serving an even more exclusive, relevant, and memorable relationship.