The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is betting that the next beauty search engine is an AI assistant. The company has entered a global strategic partnership with AI marketing platform Profound to monitor and optimize how its entire portfolio of brands appears across generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Gemini.
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Profound helps brands understand how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity see and describe them. In simple terms, it monitors the questions consumers are asking, tracks whether a brand or product appears in AI-generated recommendations, identifies inaccuracies or missing information, and helps companies improve their online content so AI systems are more likely to understand, accurately describe and recommend their products. Think of it as SEO for the AI era.
Often described as GEO/AEO (generative engine optimization/agentic engine optimization, this system structures content so it is more likely to be discovered, understood and cited by AI-powered search tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. SEO (eearch engine optimization), by contrast, is primarily focused on helping content rank highly in traditional search-engine results. While both rely on clear, authoritative and relevant content, GEO places greater emphasis on machine-readable context, direct answers, credible sources and content that AI systems can easily summarize and reference, rather than simply maximizing search rankings.
The ELC-Profound partnership goes beyond tracking conventional search rankings. ELC says the deal will give it a unified view of how its brands are represented across major AI platforms, including when brands are recommended, how they are described and where information may be inaccurate or missing. It will then use Profound's tools to optimize brand content accordingly.
For beauty marketers, that represents a significant shift in what it means to be discoverable. In traditional search, brands compete for clicks and rankings against a relatively stable set of results. In generative search, consumers increasingly ask an AI assistant to interpret their needs and deliver a recommendation. The brand may never appear as a conventional search result at all; it has to be understood well enough by the underlying model to make the recommendation.
ELC plans to apply this approach across product description pages, blogs, YouTube channels and content creation, with particular attention to product information, ingredients, claims and benefits. The objective is not simply to generate more content, but to make existing information easier for large language models to understand and surface accurately.
ELC says it is the first prestige beauty company to deploy Profound globally across its full brand portfolio and to operationalize GEO at this scale. That portfolio spans fragrance, skin care, makeup and hair care, including Estée Lauder, Clinique, La Mer, M·A·C, Jo Malone London, Le Labo, Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, Kilian Paris, Tom Ford and The Ordinary.
The implication for product development and marketing is substantial. Product information increasingly needs to be structured not only for human shoppers and conventional search engines, but also for AI systems interpreting questions about efficacy, ingredients, scent profiles, use cases and brand positioning. A poorly structured product page, ambiguous claim or inconsistent ingredient description could potentially affect how an AI assistant characterizes or recommends a product.
For fragrance in particular, the implications could be especially interesting. Consumers can ask AI systems highly subjective questions—What smells like this? What fragrance should I wear to this occasion? Which perfume has these notes? What is a good alternative to X?—requiring models to connect sensory language, ingredients, consumer preferences and product attributes. Brands therefore have a growing incentive to make fragrance descriptions sufficiently detailed and consistent for machines to interpret alongside consumers.
ELC's announcement also signals that GEO is moving from an experimental marketing tactic toward an enterprise capability. Rather than leaving individual brands to react to AI visibility independently, the company is bringing AI representation data into its broader operating ecosystem and creating a centralized view across its portfolio.
If consumers increasingly delegate product discovery to AI assistants, being accurately represented by those systems could become as important as ranking on Google, appearing on retailer search or securing shelf placement.
For prestige beauty, ELC is effectively making the case that the battle for discovery is shifting again, from search-engine optimization to ensuring that AI knows what a brand is, what its products do and when to recommend them.
