Estée Lauder bets on GEO to win AI-driven beauty discovery
Consumers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude where to buy beauty products. Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) just made a structured bet that showing up well in those answers is worth a dedicated enterprise partnership.
ELC signed a deal with Profound, an AI marketing platform focused on Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). The partnership covers the company’s full brand portfolio, including MAC Cosmetics and Jo Malone London.
What Profound Actually Does for ELC
Profound gives ELC a unified view of how its brands appear across major AI search platforms globally. That means visibility into when and how brands get recommended, plus identification of gaps where visibility or accuracy could improve.
On the execution side, Profound’s agentic tools will be used to optimize content across product description pages, blogs, and YouTube channels. The goal is to make product information, ingredients, claims, and benefits easier for large language models (LLMs) to read and surface to consumers.
The Operator Takeaway
Enterprise GEO strategy is still early enough that even a Fortune 500 company is treating this as a first-mover play. Aude Gandon, ELC’s Global Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, framed it directly:
“The way people discover beauty is being rewritten in real time, and we intend to shape that shift rather than reacting to it.”
James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-founder of Profound, described the approach as treating GEO the way strong marketers handle any platform shift: early, comprehensively, and with real operational commitment.
If you run a product business with any catalog presence online, the same logic applies at a smaller scale. Product descriptions and blog content optimized for LLM readability is a different task than traditional SEO, and the gap between brands doing it and brands ignoring it is widening.
Separately, ELC also recently expanded leadership roles around Amazon and AI, naming Brian Franz as Chief Technology and Transformation Officer and Amber English as President, Digital and Online, The Americas and Global Amazon Lead.
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