The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL) today announced a global strategic partnership with Profound, the category-defining AI marketing platform, advancing its ambition to be prestige beauty’s leader in AI-native discovery. The partnership will provide the company with visibility into how its full portfolio of brands is represented across leading generative AI platforms, as well as opportunities to optimize that representation. This partnership establishes the company as the first in prestige beauty to deploy Profound’s capabilities globally across the company’s full portfolio and operationalize Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI marketing at scale.
As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI assistants to discover products, compare recommendations, and seek personalized beauty advice before a purchase, The Estée Lauder Companies is partnering with Profound to define the next era of beauty discovery.
This partnership will equip the company with a unified view of how its brands appear across major AI search platforms globally, providing insight into when and how they are recommended and where opportunities exist to improve visibility and accuracy. The company will then use these insights and Profound’s agentic tools to optimize content across brands’ product description pages, blogs, YouTube channels, and content creation at scale — ensuring product information, ingredients, claims, and benefits are optimized for consumer visibility and easier for large language models to understand and surface to consumers.
“The way people discover beauty is being rewritten in real time, and we intend to shape that shift rather than reacting to it,” said Aude Gandon, Global Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, The Estée Lauder Companies. “This partnership gives every brand in our portfolio the ability to show up distinctly, consistently, and accurately wherever our consumers are asking for recommendations. Our work with Profound is a natural extension of how we already think about culture, community, and commerce working together — and it puts us at the front of an industry-wide transition.”
“The Estée Lauder Companies recognizes that understanding how its brands are represented across AI is now essential to serving consumers wherever they choose to discover products and information,” said James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-founder, Profound. “Through this partnership, the company is now approaching GEO in the way the best marketers approach any platform shift: early, comprehensively, and with real operational commitment. Enabling this strategy at scale across an entire prestige beauty portfolio sets a new bar for what enterprise AI visibility strategy looks like in this category.”
By bringing enterprise-wide AI representation insights into its One Operating Ecosystem, The Estée Lauder Companies is strengthening its ability to understand how consumers encounter its brands across emerging digital touchpoints, respond to evolving needs, and deliver more relevant experiences across its global portfolio.
