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I want to tell you about a moment that stopped me cold.
A few months ago, I typed a question into ChatGPT. Not a complicated one. Something a retail buyer, a sourcing director, or a brand’s strategy team might type on any given morning: “Who are the leading diamond suppliers in the fine-jewelry and diamond industry?”
The answer came back in seconds. It was confident, it was structured, and it was almost entirely wrong for our industry. The names and firms it cited were either general luxury consultancies with no specialist diamond knowledge, or businesses that had long since pivoted away from jewelry. The actual experts, the people who have spent decades in this trade and have the track record to prove it, were nowhere in the response.
That is not a search algorithm problem. That is a visibility crisis. And it is happening right now, quietly, while our industry looks the other way.
What changed, and why it matters
I have been in this industry for close to 30 years. I founded and built up a jewelry retail chain and took it public on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2015, which at the time was the fastest startup-to-IPO in fine-jewelry history. Getting there required, among other things, learning things that had nothing to do with diamonds or jewelry design. One of them was search engine optimization (SEO): how to make your business findable when people go looking on the internet.
I learned it the hard way. I literally cold-called the authors of articles I had read in The New York Times about SEO, because I needed to understand it and had no one around me who did. I called them from New York, introduced myself, and asked them to explain it to me. Some of them did. That willingness to find the knowledge wherever it lives, even if it means picking up the phone to a stranger, is what has defined Hill & Co.’s approach to every major shift in how business gets done.
We are at one of those moments again. And this time, the shift is faster.
The change is this: Customers, buyers, partners, journalists and due-diligence teams across our industry are no longer starting their research with a Google search that returns 10 blue links. They are asking AI. ChatGPT. Claude. Perplexity. Google’s AI Overview. Microsoft Copilot. These systems do not return a list of options. They return an answer. One synthesized response, with a small number of cited sources.
The numbers behind this are not theoretical. Research by local-SEO platform BrightLocal this year found that 45% of consumers now use AI tools to evaluate businesses, up from just 6% a year earlier. ChatGPT alone processes over two billion queries every day. AI-driven referral traffic to US retail sites surged 693% year on year during the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe. And McKinsey & Company’s State of Fashion 2026 report was direct about what this means: “AI chatbot responses are the new SEO.”
That last sentence is worth reading again. AI chatbot responses are the new SEO.
If your business, your brand, or your expertise is not being cited by AI engines when relevant questions are asked, you are invisible in the moment that matters most. Not just hard to find. Invisible.
Why our industry is especially exposed
Here is what makes this particularly urgent for our trade.
The fine-jewelry and diamond industry operates on relationships, reputation and trust. Your standing in this market has been built over years – decades, even. It lives in the heads of people who know you, in the trade press that has covered you, in the handshake deals at JCK and VicenzaOro and the Hong Kong shows. That is real, and it is valuable. But it does not automatically translate into AI visibility.
AI engines do not attend trade shows. They do not remember the deal you closed in Antwerp or the panel you spoke on in Mumbai. They read content. They assess structure, freshness, and authority signals across the open web. And what they find in our industry is, frankly, sparse.
For commercial and evaluation-stage queries, 83% of AI citations come from pages updated within the last 12 months, with more than 60% refreshed within the last six months, according to recent research from content-engineering platform AirOps. Most diamond and jewelry businesses’ websites have not had a substantive update in years. The content that does exist is designed to look beautiful, not to answer questions in a way that an AI can extract and cite.
The result is a citation pool that is nearly empty. When AI goes looking for answers about diamond sourcing, jewelry retail strategy, sustainable supply chains, or specialist consultants in this space, it finds almost nothing from the actual experts in the trade. It defaults to whatever it can find, which is often generic, outdated, or simply wrong about our industry.
To ensure that products and services are visible to AI models, says McKinsey, businesses must rethink their digital presence. Semantically rich data and structured, accessible content will be critical to success. That is a precise description of what most fine-jewelry and diamond businesses have not yet done.
The three things AI needs to find you
This is not a technology problem that requires a technology solution. It is a content and reputation structure problem, and it has three components:
1. Entity clarity. AI engines need to know who you are with consistency. If your company name appears differently across your website, your LinkedIn profile, your trade press mentions, and your industry association listings, the AI gets confused and skips you. In a world where our businesses have often grown organically, building digital footprints over decades without a coherent strategy, this inconsistency is almost universal.
2. Answer-ready content. AI engines favor content that leads with a direct, clear answer to a specific question. The kind of content most jewelry businesses publish – brand storytelling, product descriptions, beautifully written heritage narratives – is not what AI selects when it builds a response. What it selects is content structured around real questions that real buyers are asking: “What should I look for in a diamond wholesaler?” “How do I assess a supplier’s ethical-sourcing credentials?” “What does an AI strategy look like for a mid-size jewelry retailer?” If your business is not producing content that addresses those questions directly, you will not be cited, regardless of how good your actual answers would be.
3. Authority signaling. AI does not just assess what you say about yourself. It looks at what others say about you, how often credible external sources mention your name and your expertise, and whether your content has been recently updated and actively maintained. Princeton research shows that structured visibility strategies can boost presence in AI-generated responses by up to 40%. That is a meaningful competitive advantage for businesses willing to build it.
Dealers and wholesalers
I want to be specific about the business-to-business (B2B) dimension of this, because for the readers of this magazine, that is where the risk and the opportunity are most acute. When a retailer is evaluating new suppliers, when a brand is assessing sourcing partners, when a private equity firm is conducting due diligence on a diamond business, the research process now starts with AI. Not always, not exclusively, but increasingly. The AI response shapes the shortlist before a single phone call is made.
If you are a polished-diamond supplier, a wholesaler, or a midstream business trying to reach the retailers and brands that matter, and your digital presence is not structured for AI visibility, you are being removed from consideration before the conversation begins. In 2025, 94% of B2B buyers reported using generative AI during their most recent purchase process, according to marketing platform 6sense, signaling a shift in how buyers find, verify and trust what they purchase.
Your buyers have already changed their behavior. The question is whether your business has adapted to meet them.
The good news is that the window is still open. Because the citation pool in our industry is so thin, the businesses that move first will establish themselves as the default AI-cited sources in this space. Those that wait will find themselves trying to displace references that are already entrenched.
A note on what this is not
I want to be clear about something, because this topic is a popular target for technology vendors with solutions to sell. AI visibility is not about gaming an algorithm. It is not about keyword stuffing or technical tricks. The businesses succeeding at this are doing so by becoming genuinely more useful and more legible online. Better content. Consistent presence. Real answers to real questions. Maintained and updated regularly. That is not a technology investment. It is a business discipline – the same discipline that the best businesses in this industry have always applied to their relationships, their grading, their ethics, and their service. Apply it to your digital presence, and the AI will find you.
At Hill & Co., we are applying this same discipline to our own business right now. We are asking where we stand on entity clarity, content structure, and authority signals, and we are closing the gaps we find. Because the window for first-mover advantage is real, and it is not unlimited.
But you don’t need to hire us or anyone to start. You need to ask one honest question about your business: If someone asked an AI engine the most important question in your category right now, would you be in the answer? If you don’t know, find out. If the answer is no, fix it. Our industry has survived every disruption it has faced by being disciplined, relationship-driven, and willing to learn. This one is no different. The learning curve is not steep. The cost of ignoring it is.
Elle Hill is the founder and CEO of Hill & Co., an AI-forward management consulting firm specializing in the global diamond, gemstone and fine-jewelry industry. She holds nonexecutive director roles in the industry, sits on two advisory boards covering fine-jewelry sustainability and technology, and was appointed to the CIBJO Technology Committee in 2022.
Main image: Elle Hill. (Hill & Co.)
