A few months ago I typed something into Gemini.
Not a test. Not an experiment. I genuinely wanted to see what came back.
I typed: “I am looking for a web expert to help with my jewellery website, specifically AI searches and making sure my site ranks on these results.”
I have 28 years in the jewellery and watch trade. I have worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. I run a consultancy that specialises in exactly what I had just described.
Gemini did not mention me.
This is not a vanity problem
My first reaction was embarrassment. My second was curiosity. My third – once I had thought about it properly – was that this is exactly the problem my clients are about to have, and most of them do not know it yet.
Because here is what is changing in 2026.
When your customer wants to find a jeweller who stocks Longines in their city, or a web agency that understands the watch trade, they are increasingly not typing into Google and scrolling through results. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini – and they are taking the first answer they get.
That answer is not the business with the most backlinks. It is not even the business with the best Google ranking. It is the business that has made itself legible to AI systems – structured, verified, and citable.
Most businesses have not done that. I had not done that.
What AI actually needs to recommend you
Traditional SEO was about signals – links, keywords, domain authority. AI visibility is about something different. AI systems need to be confident about who you are before they will recommend you.
That means three things, at minimum:
1. Your identity needs to be unambiguous
Your business name, location, and niche need to match across every place you exist online – your website, your Google Business Profile, trade directories, press mentions. AI systems cross-reference these sources. Inconsistencies create doubt, and doubt means you do not get cited.
2. Your content needs to be answer-shaped
AI models are looking for content they can quote. Long, flowing prose is hard to cite. Short, factual, direct answers to specific questions are exactly what gets pulled into AI response panels. If your website does not contain those, you are invisible to the systems generating those panels.
3. You need to be explicitly readable
There are bots crawling your site right now that you have probably never heard of – OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Anthropic-AI. If your robots.txt is blocking them, or your site is too slow to crawl efficiently, none of the above matters. They will simply move on.
What I did about it
After that Gemini search, I rebuilt a key page on my own site from scratch – not as a service page, but as a genuine, comprehensive answer to the question a business owner would ask an AI.
I structured it around the four layers I now work through with every client: entity foundation, product or catalogue data, technical accessibility, and semantic architecture.
I wrote it the way AI systems prefer to read – question headings, direct answer blocks, capsule summaries. I added structured data, updated my robots.txt, and added an llms.txt file that tells any AI crawler exactly what my site is and what I do.
Then I waited a few weeks.
I am not going to claim Gemini now returns me as the top result for every relevant query. But the difference in how AI systems describe my business – when they describe it at all – is measurable.
More importantly, I now know exactly what to do for a client facing the same problem. Because I have done it on my own site first.
Read the full AI-Readiness framework here →
The window is open right now
The businesses that will dominate AI search results in 2027 are the ones doing this work in 2026. Not because AI visibility is complicated – it is not, once you understand the framework – but because most businesses have not started yet.
If you searched for your own business in ChatGPT or Perplexity this week and did not like what came back, that is not a permanent state. It is a gap. And gaps, in my experience, are opportunities.
Jamie Elkins is a digital consultant with 28 years in the jewellery and watch trade. He works with independent retailers, brands, and accountancy firms on ecommerce, AI pipelines, and search visibility.
Want to know what the machines say when they’re asked about your business? That’s the first thing the AI-Search Readiness Audit checks — £495, fixed, inside a week.