The Estée Lauder Companies has entered a global strategic partnership with AI marketing platform Profound as the beauty group looks to strengthen how its brands appear when consumers use generative AI tools to discover and compare products.
Announced on September 14, the partnership will give Estée Lauder a consolidated view of how brands across its portfolio are represented on major generative AI platforms. The company plans to use the insights to understand when its brands are recommended, how accurately they are described and where their visibility can be improved.
The move comes as consumers increasingly use AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini for product research, recommendations and personalised beauty advice. This is creating a new discovery layer for marketers, where brands need to consider not only their position in conventional search results but also whether they appear in AI-generated answers.
Estée Lauder said it is the first prestige beauty company to deploy Profound's capabilities globally across its entire brand portfolio and operationalise Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, and AI marketing at this scale. The portfolio includes brands such as Estée Lauder, Clinique, M·A·C, La Mer, Jo Malone London, The Ordinary and Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.
Profound's technology will help the company analyse how its brands are surfaced by AI platforms and identify opportunities to improve visibility and accuracy. Estée Lauder also plans to use Profound's agentic tools to optimise content across product description pages, blogs and YouTube channels.
The focus will extend to information such as product ingredients, claims and benefits, with the aim of making brand content easier for large language models to interpret and surface when responding to consumer queries.
Aude Gandon, Global Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at The Estée Lauder Companies, said the way consumers discover beauty products is changing and that the partnership would help brands across the portfolio appear more consistently and accurately when consumers seek recommendations through AI platforms.
The initiative will be integrated into Estée Lauder's One Operating Ecosystem, which brings together shared technology, data and strategic partners across the business. The company has also been expanding its use of AI in other areas of marketing. In April, it appointed WPP as its first global media partner as part of a move towards a more connected, data and AI-enabled global media model.
The Profound partnership reflects a broader shift in digital marketing as generative AI becomes another route through which consumers research products. For Estée Lauder, the initiative extends search visibility beyond traditional SEO into how its brands are understood and recommended by AI answer engines.
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