15 July 2026 Giuditta Armiraglio
Journal of Experiences
Starting from the new report by Bain & Company, a reflection on how AI is transforming the discovery of luxury brands and why GEO must start from people, before prompts
The report, “Winning Over the Customer in the Age of AI: A New Horizon for Luxury“, by Bain & Company captures a well-known shift: artificial intelligence is changing the way luxury brands are discovered, compared, and talked about in the AI ecosystem.
At TSW, we work with several brands in this sector—Armani and Bottega Veneta, but also Lamborghini and Cassina—and we understand the tensions involved: desirability and control, narrative and reputation, coherence and interpretation. We’re not just talking about visibility, but about representation.
Increasingly, people encounter a brand not directly, but through a response generated by a system that synthesizes sources, compares alternatives, selects attributes, and delivers a narrative. This is why the section of the report dedicated to Generative Engine Optimization — “How to appeal to LLMs: Emerging GEO best practices” — deserves attention, but also critical reading.
Discovery doesn’t always start with the brand
Bain highlights that many LLM interactions don’t start with a specific brand, but with needs, opportunities, comparisons, and desires. This is an important point, especially in the luxury industry, where it’s often assumed that the brand is the natural starting point for research.
Today, this isn’t always the case. People ask for advice, compare alternatives, and seek reassurance. It’s a dynamic we’ve observed: AI becomes a conversational space where the brand often enters later, not first.
This is why Bain is right when it encourages brands to build content aligned with real search intent. But an important clarification is needed here: real intent isn’t automatically deduced from keywords or simulated prompts. It needs to be observed, understood, and contextualized.
The real difference: starting with people, not prompts
Many GEO practices today focus on what brands should “write for LLMs.” This is just a starting point.
The risk is what we highlighted in our last event at TSW: oversimplifying. Thinking that visibility in generative systems is solved by optimizing content for a machine. But LLMs aren’t just a new search interface: they reflect human questions, hesitations, variability, and context.
This is why at TSW we insist on one point: GEO shouldn’t start with AI, but with people.
But in luxury, intent is never merely functional. People aren’t just looking for “the right product”: they seek meaning and belonging, they seek an experience consistent with their own experiences and the image they wish to build.
Therefore, an effective GEO strategy cannot simply intercept frequently asked questions. It must understand the experiences behind those questions. Only in this way can the brand be present in new spaces of discovery, without losing depth.
The influence of off-site content and reviews
An interesting point in the report concerns the importance of sources outside of official websites: media, reviews, and third-party sources. It mentions that, in searches for luxury watches, for example, only 10% of sources are the brands’ official domains. For this reason, an off-site presence becomes even more strategic in the LLM ecosystem.
But in luxury, this issue must be treated with particular care. Not all mentions have the same value. Not all reviews reinforce desirability. Not all third-party sources construct a representation consistent with the brand’s positioning. The brand is no longer the sole author of its own narrative. Today, a growing portion of perception passes through contexts that the brand does not directly control, but which it must learn to listen to, understand, and guide. And this is precisely where a new challenge arises: caring for the ecosystem that contributes to generating meaning.
The issue, therefore, is not just “being mentioned.” It’s understanding how the brand is interpreted, which attributes emerge, and which associations are consolidated. If craftsmanship, quality of experience, service, materials, durability, and culture emerge, then generative synthesis can also come closer to the brand’s true value.
GEO beyond technicalities: a new space for brand experience
Bain concludes by discussing the need for impeccable technical design in terms of content, page readability, and metadata.
From our perspective, GEO shouldn’t be approached as a technical checklist. It should be approached as a new form of visibility design: in luxury, more than anywhere else, it can’t be reduced to a purely technical discipline.
We need an approach that combines research, content, reputation, strategy, and brand sensitivity. We need to view AI not only as a new channel for visibility, but as a new space where the relationship between brand and person plays out.
This is precisely the area TSW is working on with increasing attention, even in highly complex sectors like luxury.
Because today, the question to ask isn’t simply: does my brand appear?
But rather: how is it presented when we aren’t the ones presenting it first?