Estée Lauder Partners with Profound to Optimize Brand Visibility Across AI Platforms
"This partnership gives every brand in our portfolio the ability to show up distinctly, consistently, and accurately wherever our consumers are asking for recommendations."
On September 14, Estée Lauder announced a global strategic partnership with Profound, an AI marketing platform, to monitor and improve how its portfolio of brands is represented across generative AI platforms as consumers increasingly turn to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to discover products and seek beauty recommendations before a purchase.
The partnership gives Estée Lauder a unified view of how its brands appear across major AI search platforms globally, including when and how they are recommended to consumers and where opportunities exist to improve visibility and accuracy, according to the company.
The company will use Profound's agentic tools to optimize content across product description pages, blogs, YouTube channels, and digital assets at scale, ensuring product information, ingredients, claims, and benefits are structured in ways that are easier for large language models to surface to consumers.
Estée Lauder said it is the first company in prestige beauty to deploy Profound's capabilities across its full global portfolio, operationalizing a practice the industry refers to as Generative Engine Optimization.
"This partnership gives every brand in our portfolio the ability to show up distinctly, consistently, and accurately wherever our consumers are asking for recommendations," said Aude Gandon, Global Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at Estée Lauder.
Generative Engine Optimization is emerging as the AI-era equivalent of search engine optimization - the discipline of ensuring brand content is structured and positioned in ways that AI answer engines can accurately retrieve and recommend.
The shift matters because AI assistants do not return ranked lists of links the way traditional search engines do. They synthesize answers, and the brands that surface in those answers are determined by how well their content is understood by the underlying models.
James Cadwallader, CEO and co-founder of Profound, said Estée Lauder is approaching GEO the way the best marketers approach any platform shift - early, comprehensively, and with real operational commitment.
Profound is used by 16% of the Fortune 500, including Comcast and Walmart. Estée Lauder sells products across approximately 150 countries under brands including Estée Lauder, Clinique, M·A·C, La Mer, and Too Faced.
Key Takeaways
- Estée Lauder partners with Profound to enhance AI-driven brand visibility and recommendations.
- Leverage Profound's tools to optimize content across digital platforms for better consumer engagement.
- Gain comprehensive insights into brand representation on major AI search platforms globally.
- Ensure accurate product information is easily accessible for AI models to improve customer discovery.
- Estée Lauder positions itself as a leader in prestige beauty's AI marketing landscape.