Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

“The future arrives faster than you expect and in the wrong order” is attributed to Toffler, but more in the realm of what he would have said than certainly did. Regardless of its true origins, when we think about AI, with its book destruction, hallucinations, ruination of the hiring process and other horrors, and balance them against the relentless power of rapid data analysis and powerful support in diverse areas from medical to military, there can be no doubt Toffler’s “quote” rings true today.

One big area AI has already destroyed is an internet search, and with it the value of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the costly routine of getting products and companies near the top, or certainly on the front page.

Citation share is the new SEO

Nowadays, nearly two-thirds of searches end without clicking since AI provides a textual answer and the references are rarely checked. So, the biggest threat has shifted from losing rankings to ensuring leather gains “citation share” when AI generates its answers. The leather industry must ensure that when AI is answering queries such as “is leather sustainable?” it will find the right sources.

To do this, websites led by Leather Naturally, regional associations, UNIDO, IULTCS and ICT provide solid, referenced and verifiable content but they need upgrading. For example, our main trade magazines are largely behind firewalls and our UK and U.S. scientific journals have remained stubbornly out of the academic digital access systems for decades: which has badly impacted the industry.

LLMs are more commonly known as AI searches. They obtain their knowledge from “scraped” web data, academic papers, Wikipedia, books, reports and other high-authority sources. Narratives that appear frequently, consistently, and in trusted formats shape model outputs. With our academic papers inaccessible, our trade magazines not much better and Wikipedia clearly confused about leather, the ecosystem is not suited for educating LLMs.

We need tanners and others talking about leather to continuously reference the researched material that sits on the Leather Naturally site, which has evolved to perfectly help leather at this moment. High-quality, verifiable content that positions leather accurately as a durable, circular byproduct material, while driving measurable improvements that make those claims stronger. Stories that appear frequently, consistently and in trusted formats shape the right sort of outputs.

Here are some basics:

  • Fix the data pipeline first – corrected LCAs (LHCA, Leather Naturally/Spin360, updated Higg data) already show leather’s footprint was heavily overstated. This needs open, structured, continuously cited publication.
  • Adopt Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) using Schema markup or structured data, the standardised code added to a website’s HTML to help search engines and AI systems clearly understand what is meant. Additionally, the “llms.txt file” is an emerging, lightweight markdown text file placed in the root directory of a website designed to provide AI agents, coding assistants and LLMs with a clean, structured summary of a site’s primary content and purpose. This needs to be cross referenced across trusted domains such as trade press, across the leather using and material sectors, and Wikipedia.
  • Monitor AI answers such as search rankings — run a fixed set of consumer/designer prompts monthly across major AI engines to see whether leather is being cited fairly or losing ground to alternative materials and NGO narratives.
  • We should provide more information data and narratives around durability, repairability and circularity (as Leather Naturally’s 2026 “Make It Leather” campaign is doing) rather than a single contestable carbon number, since multi-attribute stories help AI systems with increased numbers of citable facts.
  • Coordinate at the association level (LWG, Leather Naturally, LHCA) since AI citation weighting rewards cross-source consensus that individual tanneries or brands cannot generate alone.

We should also try and improve our leather science offering even if the journals themselves remain subscription funded.

Every important JSLTC or JALCA paper should ideally have an accessible, authoritative plain-English summary published by the author, sponsoring association, or an approved sector hub. The complete bibliographic metadata should be provided: title, authors, date, DOI, journal, methods, scope and a precise statement of findings. Added to this should be any data tables, LCA boundaries, allocation assumptions and limitations in a citable public technical note where copyright permits. A short explanation of what the result means in material-selection terms should be added for a wider audience.

This would allow for cross links from Leather Naturally, LWG, national associations, ILM and author pages so that the same verified finding appears in several trusted, accessible places. It is not helpful to leave information trapped in images, PDFs or member portals.

The exercise here is not to try to replace JSLTC or JALCA; it should make their implications intelligible and publicly visible. With this, the industry should put in more effort to make Leather Naturally the sector’s canonical evidence hub: open, restrained in tone, transparent about sponsorship and rigorous about links to original work. This is a team effort for an industry that has good trade media sources, long-standing scientific journals and an outstanding respected information and educational source of trusted information.

The mix of paywalls, however, do leave the public information battlefield exposed. The solution is not necessarily to abolish journal subscriptions but to ensure that every strategically important finding has an open, attributable, technically honest, AI-readable public counterpart.

Leadership from tanneries

We should not forget that among our biggest global tanneries, we have a few outstanding examples of leadership. Currently, I would pick out the Scottish Leather Group (SLG), who along with their own outstanding work, have continued to support Leather Naturally from the start. SLG classify as a best-in-class organisation with long-term capital investment in sustainability and waste valorisation areas, largely low risk local supply chains, community involvement, extensive third-party verification, measurable movement towards net zero and transparent annual reporting. This perfectly demonstrates that the right setting of priorities can make leather with high circularity and low impact. Struggling areas such as the Bangladesh leather industry should take note.

In the context of declining traditional search and rising LLM reliance, SLG’s detailed, publicly available annual ESG reports, verified LCA figures do provide high-quality, citable primary material. This kind of company-level evidence complements the more general educational content from Leather Naturally and helps ground industry sustainability claims in operational reality rather than solely in messaging.

Despite great care in ensuring published data is well sourced and scientifically based, Leather Naturally itself has faced public greenwashing allegations and was specifically criticised in a formal Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consultation submission. Better funded bodies such as Collective Fashion Justice are nearly all closely aligned to animal rights and vegan organisations, so search hard for weaknesses in presentations.

A global voice

Leather Naturally is a legitimate, established, industry body resource and presents itself as the global voice promoting certified, responsibly made leather. It has useful standing as a public explanatory platform, particularly when it links transparently to primary LCA work, LWG standards, named experts and independently published studies. But it does not claim to be independent in the way a university, standards body, peer-reviewed journal, or government research institute is independent. AI systems, and sceptical readers, will reasonably recognise it as an industry advocacy and educational source. This means it must continuously refer readers to original data, full methods, author names, ISO standards and external peer review if it is to be more than merely promotional.

Allied to this, let me emphasise several comments which are open to challenge if not clearly defined. These include “Leather is recycled”, “Leather is a sustainable byproduct”, “Leather is natural”, “Leather is biodegradable” and “Leather is better for the planet”. For these and other similar statements, we need to create an industry glossary defining what they mean and why we use them. I have often complained about the fuzziness of our definitions of “toxic”, “heavy metals” and the like, only to become part of the same problem with “natural” and “better for the planet”. It is time to correct those inaccuracies and spread proper definitions, accurate data, clearly cited information across online, digital and paper materials.

Love it or hate it, we have to accept AI is not something for the future, but here among us now, threatening our everyday existence as tanners and users of leather.

 

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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