Estée Lauder Announces Strategy to Grow AI Brand Visibility

Estée Lauder is looking to grow its brand visibility as AI changes product discovery. 

The company has announced a global strategic partnership with AI marketing platform Profound, with the aim of being prestige beauty’s leader in AI-native discovery. 

Sharing the news of the partnership on LinkedIn, James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-founder of Profound, said that he was “honoured” to announce Profound’s collaboration with Estée Lauder, saying that the beauty company would "deploy Profound to its full global brand portfolio, operationalising AI marketing at scale”.

This partnership is designed to provide Estée Lauder with further visibility into how its brand portfolio is represented across GenAI platforms, while also helping the company further optimise that representation. 

“The Estée Lauder Companies recognises that understanding how its brands are represented across AI is now essential to serving consumers wherever they choose to discover products and information,” says James.

“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.”

AI’s change to the buyer journey

Consumers are increasingly turning to AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini as part of the buyer journey – spanning product discovery, recommendations and personalisation. 

AI overviews are also leading to a decrease in organic site visits. 

Research from Advanced Web Ranking found that, as of March 2026, AI overviews appear in 48% of all Google search queries, while a Seer Interactive Study found that organic CTR drops 61% when an AI overview is present. 

Estée Lauder’s partnership with Profound is designed to help the company get more control and visibility over this environment, giving the company a more unified view of how its brands are appearing across major AI search platforms – providing insight into how and when they are recommended, as well as opportunities to improve visibility. 

According to Estée Lauder, it plans to use these insights to better optimise content across product description pages, blogs, YouTube channels and content creation, to ensure information is designed for LLMs to understand and share with consumers. 

“The way people discover beauty is being rewritten in real time, and we intend to shape that shift rather than reacting to it,” says Aude Gandon, Global Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of Estée Lauder. 

“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.”

Estée Lauder’s tech innovations

Estée Lauder has already been making changes to its digital strategy. 

In June, the company launched a personalised scent scanner in collaboration with Pinterest, which analyses the visual cues of a person’s Pinterest board to offer personalised Jo Malone fragrance recommendations. 

This, Estée Lauder says, has been created to offer new ways for consumers to find their own personal scent – shifting the starting point towards images rather than words, which can often be difficult for buyers to interpret.

“For years, personalisation in beauty meant asking people what they wanted. The bigger opportunity is to understand what they already love – and to meet them where their taste already lives,” Aude said of the launch. 

“Scent Scanner demonstrates how we can combine the power of creativity and commerce to make fragrance discovery more relevant and engaging.

Who are Estée Lauder’s key partners? 

• Shopify: Estée Lauder’s strategic partnership with Shopify has helped the company modernise its digital technology infrastructure and deliver best-in-class omnichannel consumer experiences for customers.
• Profound: This partnership is supporting the company’s expansion of AI visibility across its global brand portfolio, with Profound helping Estée Lauder transition to AI-powered discovery while better understanding how consumers discover, evaluate and engage with its brands.
• Microsoft: In 2025, Estée Lauder and Microsoft announced they were building a generative AI ecosystem, with Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search to gather data, identify trends, build marketing assets, inform research and move products to market faster.
• Pinterest: Pinterest and Estée Lauder announced a partnership in June 2026 to launch Scent Scanner, to help improve product discovery on the Pinterest platform. Scent Scanner reads visual inspiration – such as imagery, colour palettes, textures and aesthetics – to make personalised fragrance recommendations.