Why is GEO the next battle for brands and what the natural diamond industry teaches us about it?
By Eglantine Tranie Wignolle, Partner, Artefact US
The 11 PM question
Picture someone at home, alone, late at night, thinking about proposing. They don’t call a friend. They don’t Google. They open ChatGPT and type: “should I buy a natural diamond or a lab-grown one?”
That question is being asked thousands of times a day. AI answers it, in one paragraph, with one point of view, before that person ever visits a store, a website, or talks to a jeweler.
9 out of 10 Gen Z consumers now use AI before buying anything (Suzy, 2025). Not Google, not Instagram, AI. So here is the real question: what does AI say about your brand? Because if you’re not actively shaping the answer, someone else is. Or worse, no one is.
I recently joined a Natural Diamond Council panel at JCK Las Vegas alongside NDC Editor-in-Chief Sam Broekema, jeweler Briony Raymond New York,, Mytheresa’s Emily Wansbrough, and jewelry designer Dorian Webb. to discuss this shift.
Photo of the panel
From search to conversation
For years, digital marketing was built around SEO, ranking for keywords, appearing on the first page. That game still matters, but a new one has started on top of it. Young consumers don’t want a list of links, they want a trusted advisor. And AI is becoming exactly that.
Here’s how AI forms its answers: it trusts consensus. If one website says natural diamonds are special, that’s a claim. If Vogue, the New York Times, the GIA, three independent designers, and a gemologist all say something consistent, that becomes fact in the AI’s world.
Think of it like the old Wikipedia moment. Before Wikipedia, “what is a natural diamond” had a thousand different answers depending on who you asked. Wikipedia didn’t change diamonds, it made the authoritative answer consistent and findable. AI is the new Wikipedia.
Except it doesn’t just define things. It recommends, compares, and advises.
Right now, if you ask most AI tools about natural versus lab-grown diamonds, the answer lands somewhere around: “lab-grown is cheaper, natural is rarer and more sentimental, it depends on your priorities.” Neutral at best. The extraordinary story of natural diamonds, like a billion years of pressure, a geological fingerprint that exists nowhere else on earth barely makes it in.
That gap between the story natural diamonds deserve and the story AI currently tells? That’s where the entire industry should be focused.
Quote from Eglantine “The most powerful jewelry salesperson in the world right now isn’t a person. It’s an AI. And most brands have no idea what it’s saying about them.”
GEO: the new playbook brands need now
So what do you actually do about it? This is where GEO, generative engine optimization, comes in. Think of it as the evolution of SEO: instead of optimizing to rank on a search results page, you’re optimizing to appear in the AI’s answer. Same ambition, different game.
There are three layers to get it right.
1. Be findable in AI answers
AI does not just surface the loudest voice; it surfaces the most validated story. Brands need to ensure their narrative is told across trusted publications, expert blogs, and industry authorities, press. AI learns from consensus, so build the corpus.
2. Personalize at scale
AI shopping assistants are already delivering real commercial results. Signet reportedly saw an 88.6% conversion lift from an AI shopping tool. Kendra Scott drove 160% more revenue from customers who used theirs. What changed? The AI asked the right questions: who is this for, what’s the occasion, what do they love? It replicated the in-store conversation online, at midnight, in 30 seconds. For independent jewelry designers, that’s not a threat. It’s a distribution tool. A way to give someone who can’t walk into your atelier something close to that guided, personal experience.
- Educate through AI, not around it
The instinct is to compete with AI. The smarter move is to feed it. Create content that is story-rich, provenance-led, and structured in a way that AI can parse and surface. Natural diamonds have exactly the kind of deep, layered narrative that AI rewards: billions of years, unique geological signatures, rarity that lab-grown simply cannot replicate. That’s not marketing. That’s geology. And geology wins in AI answers.
The cultural moment is already here
A few weeks ago, Zoë Kravitz was photographed wearing a large antique cushion-cut natural diamond ring. No announcement. Just a blurry photo. Within 48 hours, jewelry media everywhere was writing about it. Searches spiked. Designers started getting calls about elongated cushion cuts.
Here’s the question nobody in the industry was asking: when those readers went to AI to ask “where can I find an antique cushion diamond like Zoë Kravitz’s”, which brands showed up? The moment existed, the desire too. Now AI can either connect that desire to a brand or not. The brands that had invested in GEO captured that moment. The ones that hadn’t, missed it entirely, even if their product was exactly what Zoe Kravitz was wearing.
A celebrity wearing your product used to be a pure PR win. Today it’s only a win if your brand is the AI’s when asked.
This isn’t just a diamond story
Natural diamonds are, in many ways, a perfect case study for what GEO demands: extraordinary, provenance, deep emotional weight, and an industry that has been slow to translate all of that into the language, AI understands. But this challenge belongs to every brand.
Whether you sell luxury hospitality, premium skincare, financial services, or B2B software, your potential customers are already asking AI to compare, recommend, and advise before they ever reach you.
Adobe’s 2025 data shows that AI-referred traffic now converts almost as well as traditional search traffic (the gap narrowed from -43% to just -9% in eight months). The consumer is ahead of the brand.
The math is simple: if your brand doesn’t exist in the answers that AI gives, you don’t exist to the next generation of buyers. Market leadership won’t belong to the companies with the biggest traditional ad spend. It will belong to the brands that master GEO, those that know how to translate their heritage, their values, and their distinct story into the language that algorithms trust and consumers love.
The consumer journey now starts with a question, not a website visit. The only question left is: are you in the answer?
BIO + photo EG:
Eglantine Tranie is a Partner at Artefact US, where she leads brand and marketing strategy for clients across luxury, retail, and consumer goods. She speaks regularly on AI, digital transformation, and the future of consumer experience.
