Dec 18, 2025
TLC Doubles Citations and Secure Its First AI Mentions in 90 days
Within 90 days, The Luxury Closet secured its first AI citations and mentions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. During the same period, TLC grew high-intent AI search traffic by 6× and increased generative visibility by 34%, moving from nearly invisible to consistently surfaced across key luxury queries.
2x
Average citations and mentions
6x
Growth in high-intent AI search traffic
92%
Engaged-session rate from GEO traffic
Overview
The Luxury Closet (TLC) is a global marketplace for authenticated pre-owned luxury fashion, rapidly expanding its footprint across the UAE and broader Middle East. As the brand entered a critical growth phase, TLC partnered with Crossfill to accelerate traction and reinforce its position as one of the region’s most trusted luxury resale authorities.
Despite strong SEO investment and a robust content foundation, TLC confronted a new visibility gap: AI Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity were quickly influencing luxury sales, yet TLC was nearly invisible across these platforms. To close this gap, TLC partnered with Crossfill to translate its editorial depth into machine-interpretable authority across AI discovery platforms.
As AI systems act as both discovery channels and attention competitors, being cited directly is essential to sustain traffic and trust. Recent empirical work shows that providing compact, verifiable passages and explicit source links increases the chance models will select and cite content, supporting the value of concise, evidence-forward formats for citation capture.
Analyzing TLC’s AI Visibility
Crossfill assessed how TLC’s content was being interpreted, surfaced, and credited across AI discovery platforms.
The review focused on three areas: where the brand already appeared in luxury search journeys, where visibility gaps limited exposure, and how effectively content was positioned to capture high-intent resale and authentication demand.
Three primary insights emerged:
03
Product-centric positioning limited visibility
TLC’s content often surfaced in contexts tied to product exploration rather than informational guidance. As AI systems increasingly elevated expert reasoning and decision support, content that focused primarily on listings without consistently anchoring educational value was less likely to be positioned as authoritative across AI discovery platforms.
02
Inconsistent citation and authority signaling
Although TLC is widely recognized by consumers as a trusted luxury resale authority, generative engines did not consistently identify or credit the brand’s expertise. Competing publishers were cited more frequently, revealing a disconnect between TLC’s real-world authority and its machine-interpretable authority. This gap indicated that while TLC’s insights were strong, its content lacked the structural cues AI systems use to attribute expertise and assign citations. Recent research on citation evaluation (CiteEval) highlights that language models frequently struggle to produce correct and verifiable citations; improving on-page provenance, explicit sourcing, and tightly scoped claims materially helps downstream attribution quality in retrieval-augmented and generative systems.
01
TLC Was Nearly Invisible Across AI Answers
AI visibility across major engines was below 1%, and competitors consistently dominated the high-intent luxury questions TLC should have owned. While TLC had credible editorial content, it did not explicitly reflect the core queries driving luxury research. Because these high-intent questions were not structurally represented, AI systems were unable to reliably associate them with TLC, limiting the brand’s presence in the moments where buyers seek authoritative guidance.
Crossfill Recommendations
Based on these insights, Crossfill delivered a structured roadmap designed to expand TLC’s authority across AI discovery platforms and ensure the brand was consistently surfaced and credited. The recommendations aligned directly with the GEO strategy: treating AI as a distinct discovery channel, not an SEO add-on, and optimizing for how generative systems read, interpret, and attribute expertise. For more on this approach, see our related case study, How Cerebro Achieved over 15x Growth in Visibility with Crossfill.
Strengthen alignment with real buyer questions
Prioritize optimization around the questions and topics that reflect real luxury-buyer discovery behavior. Deepen focus on the value factors customers prioritize, ensuring content aligns naturally with their decision flow and purchase intent. This approach helps AI systems better understand and match TLC’s content to qualified, high-intent queries from key customers.
Enhance authority signals to support consistent attributions
Refine content structure and contextual cues to clearly position TLC as a leading authority in luxury resale and authentication. Strengthen the signals that help AI models identify expert guidance and attribute insights appropriately, reinforcing TLC’s role as a trusted source for high-intent shoppers and AI platforms alike.
Pair product highlights with insight-driven context
Layer structured guidance alongside product visibility to support how customers evaluate quality, authenticity, and fit for their needs. Position content to not only showcase products but also offer perspective, context, and value-driven rationale that AI engines prefer to cite.
Combine product attributes with buyer guidance, including size guides, materials, care, resale value retention, warranty considerations, and return policy clarity.
Ensure price, availability, and compatibility data are explicit to reduce ambiguity for answer engines.
TLC’s Results with Crossfill
The collaboration delivered sustained and measurable gains across all core visibility and engagement metrics. Optimized articles consistently achieved stronger placement and recognition across leading AI discovery platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity. For additional examples of GEO outcomes, explore the Crossfill blog.
Citations and Mentions
All optimized content achieved at least a 2× growth in citations and mentions, supported by a +34% lift in AI visibility across high-intent luxury queries. TLC’s expertise became more consistently recognized and surfaced in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Result highlights:
The Handbags Worth Investing guide experienced a 300% lift in AI visibility, driven by a 200% jump in citations.
The Best Dior Bags guide achieved a 650% overall lift, earning its first-ever AI mentions and establishing stronger authority in its category..
The Investment-Worthy Everyday Bags also secured its first AI citations and mentions, signaling improved query alignment and growing recognition across platforms.
Engagement and Revenue
AI-sourced visitors not only arrived in greater volume, they also showed stronger purchase intent and commercially meaningful conversion behavior. Traffic from generative platforms sustained a 92% engagement rate, defined as the percentage of visitors who interacted meaningfully with the content through actions such as scrolling, clicking into product paths, exploring resale guidance, or continuing deeper into the site experience.
Average engagement time across all platforms increased, with certain AI platforms extending past a minute — far above typical top-of-funnel benchmarks. Engaged sessions per active user also increased, and bounce rates declined, reinforcing the overall lift in traffic quality driven by generative visibility.
These patterns collectively point to generative discovery emerging as a net-new, high-intent acquisition channel for The Luxury Closet.
GEO Traffic Performance
Improved generative visibility translated directly into qualified traffic lift. Weekly sessions attributed to AI-driven discovery increased by more than 20x, reflecting a clear surge in high-intent luxury demand and search-driven purchase exploration.
The chart below visualizes performance across the three leading AI discovery platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Outcome
The Luxury Closet and Crossfill partnership demonstrates how structured content refinement can turn editorial strength into measurable AI visibility and commercial performance. By aligning with real luxury search behavior and reinforcing machine-readable cues, TLC achieved 6× growth in high-intent AI search traffic, 2× more citations and mentions across generative platforms, and a new stream of revenue.
“We went from invisible to owning key answers in just a few months"
Kara Moddemann
VP Marketing & Growth @ TLC
By treating AI as its own acquisition channel, TLC optimized for how generative systems reason, attribute, and recommend, boosting visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Crossfill empowers brands to translate their expertise into lasting visibility and authority across the next generation of search.