Charlotte Tilbury, e.l.f. Beauty and Maybelline New York are leading the way when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) optimisation.
A new report has analysed the best-performing beauty brands across AI platforms ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, examining how these platforms recommend beauty brands and which companies appeared most frequently.
The study by beauty performance marketing agency Foundation saw Maybelline New York take the top spot as the best-performing beauty brand across the platforms, followed closely behind by e.l.f. Beauty and Charlotte Tilbury.
The methodology used 20-plus real beauty buyer prompts across the four popular AI engines, and repeated the analysis over three separate runs to test consistency to reveal the brands winning with generative engine optimisation (GEO).
The beauty brands getting AI recognition
While AI brand visibility is far from random, the brands pushed out by the models vary with the data revealing these recommendations are often category-specific.
The AI models reward brands that have established themselves within specific categories, from budget brands to ‘clean’ beauty, as well as revealing leaders within specific product areas.
40 brands appeared consistently across all the models’ recommendations, found the report.
“The 40 consistent brands are the key category players, they own these areas and that is why it appears to be important for AI recommendations,” Olivia Ford, Performance Lead at Foundation, told Cosmetics Business.
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L’Oréal Paris, NYX, Maybelline New York and e.l.f. Beauty led the way for affordable brands, while luxury-focused prompts would recommend the likes of Giorgio Armani, Charlotte Tilbury and NARS Cosmetics.
“For me, the surprises were seeing smaller brands, like Tower28 and Saie, consistently appear against some of the bigger brands,” said Ford.
“They cannot compete on size and budget, but their powerful comm
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