LLMs Misunderstand Luxury Brands. Here’s How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy for AI.

As LLMs and AI agents increasingly displace traditional search and sway consumer decisions, brands face a new challenge: being seen and correctly interpreted by machines. This has accelerated interest in generative engine optimization (GEO) and in what some call “bot psychology,” or how AI systems interpret meaning, authority, and relevance when they generate answers on consumers’ behalf. The general advice has been that brands should structure product data for machine readability, seed authoritative language in owned and earned media, and monitor (as we’ve previously discussed in HBR) their “share of model” across platforms.