Say goodbye to SEO — it’s all about GEO now

Almost half (48%) of luxury shoppers are using AI for inspiration and discovery when searching for watches, according to new research by the Business of Fashion and McKinsey. 

“Appetite to use AI is strongest in categories requiring comparison and product knowledge,” sums up the report, which surveyed 2,000 luxury clients across the US and China. An even larger number of survey respondents (57%) used AI to research and understand product differences around watches.

It makes sense. Buying a luxury timepiece is not like buying a pair of shoes or a hat. There’s a lot of inherent knowledge to get your head around, obscure terminology to decode, and points of comparison to consider. Whether you’re a first-time buyer and or are building your collection, a tool like AI will speed up your research process. 

So what does this mean for brands and retailers? AI has become the new SEO — although now it’s called Generative Engine Optimisation. Like SEO, it’s all about organising your website and content so that the AI crawlers can easily find the information they’re looking to scrape. In brief: data has to be properly structured; copy has to be factual, helpful and trustworthy; and sites made easy for bots to navigate and parse. The survey found that 44% of respondents used AI to compare prices and reviews, meaning it’s vital these things are easily discoverable by bots.

So to stay in the game, retailers now have to master GEO, just like they previously did with SEO. 

More interestingly, though, is how AI is actually changing how people shop. For starters, AI is a lot more personal than an old-school Google search — shoppers can feed it as much detail as they like about what precisely they’re looking for. Consequently, the results shown are a lot narrower in scope, with only a handful of tailored answers coming back. 

As a shopper, shopping with AI becomes about specificity and curation — and the more information you plug in, the more specific it can become. The emphasis shifts from finding many products to finding exactly the right product for you. Final decisions become quicker and easier, with the aid of AI’s ever-positive, ever-confident voice in your ear. 

This is also reflected by the data: the report found that 49% of luxury shoppers used AI to speed up their decision-making process, and find specific products more quickly.

Although this new way of shopping means there are fewer opportunities for products to be recommended by AI, if a brand does manage to land one of the top-five grail spots, research also shows that there’s a higher chance of successful conversions being made. This is because shopping with AI leads to more sales than by traditional online searches, says additional new research by Adobe.

So as shoppers turn to AI to discover and — potentially most significantly — decide their next watch, it’s up to luxury brands and retailers to make sure they’re ready for the robots.