AI Search Reshapes Beauty Retail Visibility

- Legacy beauty brands like Borghese and RoC are actively adapting to what is being called "generative engine optimization," or GEO, moving beyond traditional SEO to maintain visibility in AI-driven search. - The shift in consumer behavior is significant, with 76% of beauty shoppers open to using a trusted AI-powered personal shopper and 83% of active generative AI users relying on its results to form product opinions. - Competitor Ulta Beauty has been investing in this space for years, acquiring AI company QM Scientific in 2019 and launching a venture fund, Prisma Ventures, that invests in AI startups like MyAvana for hair analysis and product recommendations. - This focus on AI-driven personalization is a core part of Ulta's strategy, contributing to a 95% customer repurchase rate by using its extensive first-party data from over 38 million loyalty members. - To appear in AI-generated answers, brands are now structuring product pages to answer conversational, long-tail questions and using detailed schema markup to explicitly label information like product identifiers (SKU or GTIN), price, and availability for AI crawlers. - Major beauty conglomerates are prioritizing this shift; L'Oréal has been testing generative AI discoverability since 2024, and Estée Lauder has made AI search visibility a key focus for its brands Clinique and Origins. - The new search technology prioritizes and aggregates a wide range of data, including customer reviews, social media sentiment, and third-party certifications; products with these "verified trust signals" are 259% more likely to be recommended by AI shopping tools. - This technological race is happening as AI is forecast to influence 53% of all U.S. purchase decisions, with AI-driven commerce fueling a market expected to reach $243.7 billion.