The Luxury Answer Index

How AI engines describe the luxury industry

Edition One Swiss watchmaking Every eligible house exhibiting at Geneva Watch Days 2026

Edition one · Swiss watchmaking

What the AI engines tell a buyer
about Swiss watchmaking.

The engines have already answered. The Index put the questions a buyer asks to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity 17,820 times, and recorded every answer.

The population

Every eligible Swiss watch house exhibiting at Geneva Watch Days 2026.

The Luxury Answer Index is a recurring measurement of how AI answer engines describe the luxury industry.

Each edition takes a complete population of houses in one category, puts the questions a buyer asks to four engines across three markets over fifteen days, and records every answer.

Each answer receives one of five verdicts, assigned by a rule fixed and published before sampling begins. It is published by ELIA Atelier and available to read without charge.

The Luxury Answer Index is published by ELIA Atelier and measures how AI answer engines describe the luxury industry. Edition one, published 27 August 2026, records 17,820 answers across 46 Swiss watch houses, nine buyer questions, four engines and three markets.

Forty-six houses measured. Names announced .

  1. {{ house.name }}
01

The method in numerals

46
Houses measured

Nine buyer questions, each put eleven times, make ninety-nine prompts.

Prompts per market, per engine, per day
99
Answer engines
4
Markets
3
Consecutive days
15
17,820
Recorded answers

Nine buyer questions, each put eleven times, give ninety-nine prompts in every market, on every engine, every day. Four engines, three markets, fifteen consecutive days: 17,820 recorded answers. English throughout. Every answer is read against all forty-six houses.

Every answer is recorded with its date, market, engine and full text, and the method is published in full with the edition.

What the edition will report

On 27 August the edition reports, for the whole population of forty-six houses:

  1. I

    how many are never named when a buyer asks what to buy at their price

  2. II

    which houses are named instead, and what those houses have in common

  3. III

    how widely the engines steer a buyer towards the pre-owned market rather than the boutique, and whether the figures they quote carry any source

  4. IV

    where the answer changes between the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore

  5. V

    and how far the four engines agree with one another about the same house

Until publication

12
Days
19
Hours
00
Minutes
00
Seconds

Edition one publishes on .

Edition one · Swiss watchmaking · St-Sulpice

02
The five verdicts
I
Verdict one
Recommended
Put forward by name, in terms that favour the house.
II
Verdict two
Named without endorsement
Present as a matter of record, with no reason to be chosen.
III
Verdict three
Named and discounted
Named, then steered towards pre-owned or a lower price.
IV
Verdict four
Substituted
Asked about, and the answer arrives carrying another house.
V
Verdict five
Absent
The question is the house's own territory, and it is not in the answer.

What an engine tells a buyer, in a given market, on a given day, can only be found by asking it.

Nobody had asked.

The Index asked 17,820 times.

03
The founder
Alexandre Olive, founder of ELIA Atelier

Alexandre Olive

Twenty years inside the luxury industry, thirteen at executive level in high jewellery and watchmaking, ten sparring with founders and senior executives. An entrepreneur who came to AI by building products and workflows for another house of his own.

The paradigm has changed. Consumers now ask ChatGPT and its peers about anything they consider, and those engines gather their information in a way that owes nothing to the SEO era of Google and Bing. The smaller houses are not geared for this, and they are absent.

The Luxury Answer Index gathers data on how the engines answer, so that smaller houses can appear in the right places, described the right way. ELIA Atelier acts on what it finds, and advises the house on how AI enters it.

04
How a house is answered
The private letter

Every measured house receives its private letter without charge, from . The letter gives the house its position across the five verdicts.

If you would rather have it before publication, write to alexandre@eliaatelier.ch.

Request your private letter
The Report

The Report. The complete record behind that position: every recorded answer, the sources that produced it, and the field around the house. CHF 2,000, identical for every measured house, published and never negotiated.

The Report ›
The calendar
Edition one
Swiss watchmaking

Publishes , in the week before Geneva Watch Days, and the category repeats on a fixed calendar.

Edition two
Watchmaking widened

. The forty-six houses and further Swiss watch houses under the same rule, with jewellery and high jewellery introduced.

Thereafter
Further categories
  • Perfumery
  • Wine and spirits
  • High-end real estate
  • High-end hotels and wellness

Every edition after the first measures movement against the one before it.

The practice behind the Index

What do the engines tell your buyers?

Edition one covers Swiss watchmaking. A Private Reading covers a single house, in the markets it sells to.

Any house, in jewellery, beauty, perfumery, wine, hospitality or real estate, may commission a Private Reading: its buyers' questions, put to four engines in the markets it sells to, recorded and read under the same protocol as the Index.

A reading is measurement; it never touches the published Index, and it cannot be bought as a verdict.

For the work that follows a reading, ELIA Atelier, the publisher's practice, advises houses on what the engines say about them, and that relationship is disclosed on the method page.

Commission a Private Reading