Category: Insights

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Insights The Latest Look

A “paws” for thought: why beauty brands are investing more into pet care

rituals dog spa collection

Pet grooming has historically sat in its own ‘lane’, often associated with vets or smelly pet shops, and being a fairly practical and utilitarian affair. However, something has changed in the last few years, pet grooming, with a focus on dogs in particular, has become an area we’re seeing more and more well known beauty or fashion houses expand into – and frankly, we’re not actually that surprised.

Beauty is famous for category creeping

Over the last decade, beauty brands have been category creeping, taking over almost every adjacent space that could be considered relevant – from wellness categories like supplements to homeware fragrance, it was only a matter of time before brands noticed this untapped category and realised their demographic are also pet owners and looking for more luxurious alternatives to make their pets smell and look as good as they do.

Over the last few years we’ve seen a surprising amount of well-known brands, across a range of budget and brand ethos’ enter the pet/dog grooming space. From designer brand Dolce & Gabbana, haircare specialists OUAI, fragrance specialists Jo Malone London and sustainability focused brands like Green People and Faith in Nature all offering some kind of elevated dog grooming shampoo, conditioners or perfumes.

And it would be amiss not to mention the retailers stocking these products too- online beauty retailers Lookfantastic, Cult Beauty (both THG-owned) and Feelunique all added pet care to their lifestyle offering, and this also proved to be a success for these brands. Taking Lookfantastic as an example, who led the way with this offering, they saw dog shampoo searches jump 38% over three months after entering the category in 2021.

Rituals dog spa collection

Some beauty brands brands taking the dog grooming leap

OUAI, the trailblazer here with its Fur Bébé dog shampoo, on the more luxury end of the price spectrum priced at £28 per bottle, launched as a limited-edition SKU back in 2018, well before this became a trend. It’s a sign that this dog grooming trend has been quietly building for a good few years now.

Jo Malone London, one of the newer brands to enter the dog grooming block this month, took the formulation route, partnering with British pet-care specialist WildWash with its Orange & Cedarwood dog shampoo, priced at £18. It produces a scent lifted straight from its signature fragrance language and then applied to an entirely new customer- our fury, four-legged kind!

Rituals is the latest and arguably most ambitious brand to enter the category. Launched this September, Rituals Dog Care debuted with not just one but seven products: a shampoo, dry shampoo, paw balm, mouth spray, detangling spray, air & fabric freshener, and a dog perfume. The range is completed with an adjustable collar, dog ball and a portable water bowl, alongside two curated gift sets available to buy. It’s a striking level of commitment from a brand best known for candles and body care- a clear signal that Rituals sees dog grooming as more than a passing marketing moment!

And then there’s Dolce & Gabbana, which pushed the crossover furthest of all with Fefé, an £83 fragrance made specifically for dogs. Beauty’s luxury-pricing logic applied, almost provocatively, to a market that’s never had a “designer” tier before.

It was only a matter of time

Alongside the fact that the beauty industry is pretty brazen with its category creeping, there are three other factors that play into the rise of the beauty dog grooming trend:

Skinification:

The same ingredient-transparency mindset driving human skincare (targeted formulas, active ingredients, the want to “know what’s in it”) is being applied to coat and skin care for pets.

Pet humanisation

Dogs are increasingly treated as family members whose self-care routines mirror their owners’. Owners spend more on their dog grooming than they spend on their own hair cuts and if you’re doing a five-step evening routine, then why shouldn’t your dog get one too?

Premiumisation

Pet care has traditionally been a value category but beauty brands see white space at the top of the market that few have claimed yet, until now.

Tread carefully

While most are loving this niche trend becoming more popular, it isn’t all positive. Dolce & Gabbana’s Fefé drew criticism from the RSPCA, a reminder that crossing into an animal-welfare-adjacent category may carry reputational risk, especially if it reads as opportunistic rather than genuine.

The brands that have landed well here are Jo Malone with an established pet grooming partner WildWash, OUAI that has garnered years of quiet credibility and the likes of Faith in Nature whose formulations are natural, specifically formulated for dogs and cruelty free. These brands appear to be treating the category as a real formulation challenge, not just another marketing stunt.

What does it mean for brands and marketers?

This is a great example of testing just how far a brand’s offering and credibility can stretch before it starts to lose shape. Fragrance houses moving into scent-led grooming makes intuitive sense, just as a skincare brand extending into ingredient-led pet coat care can feel like a natural next step. 

But there’s a lesson here for any brand considering a move into an adjacent category, whether that’s pet care or something else. The extension needs to have a credible link back to what the brand is already known and trusted for. A cute product shot might grab attention, but it won’t create credibility and sales on its own.

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Insights The Latest Look

Why the way you measure influencers might be failing you

Woman eating pizza in bed

Your latest campaign report lands but the numbers look thin.

Twelve creators, 400,000 views and the discount code was redeemed 38 times.


Somewhere in the gap between that reach and that revenue sits the conversation that every beauty marketer has had with their finance director who wants to know what the budget actually bought.

Here’s what we typically find happens in that gap.

Why beauty buying doesn’t follow the click

Beauty shoppers rarely buy on first sight. They see a product once in a get-ready-with-me video on socials, then again in a dermatologist’s explainer, then a third time in a comparison video where someone they trust puts it next to the thing they already own. Trust in skincare matters and it builds slowly because the purchase carries a risk- a £45 serum that reacts badly costs the customer more than just the £45.

The research the consumers do outside of seeing the product placements happens in places analytics tools cannot see.

Think about the TikTok comments section where people report how the product behaved on their skin type. Or a Reddit thread comparing it to the cult favourite. Even a screenshot you’ll never see dropped into an encrypted WhatsApp group with “has anyone tried this?”

Each of those touchpoints moves the sale forward but none show up in a report as a session, a source, or a click.

Despite this, the way we measure ‘performance’ has barely moved. The Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 Benchmark Report found 45.9% of brands still rely on promo and discount codes as their primary way of tracking creator performance. While these codes work beautifully for people who buy within 48 hours, they miss almost everyone else.

woman browsing on phone

Here are four things that can help prove their value

From our work with influencers, we’ve seen that creator activity pays back in four different areas, and each one needs its own metric. Report all four together, and you have a channel you can defend to any naysayers during your next budget meetings.

Is it converting?

Probably the easiest of the lot- start with the revenue you can trace. Discount codes, affiliate links, TikTok Shop checkouts and creator-allowlisted ads all produce clean numbers, and you should track every one of them. The mistake we can make is treating that figure as the total when really it’s just the beginning.

Allowlisting (previously known as whitelisting, a term the industry has largely dropped) is when a creator grants a brand permission to run paid ads directly from the creator’s own social handle. Instead of the brand reposting or repurposing the content under its own account, it gets access through the platform’s ad tools- Meta’s Partnership Ads or TikTok’s Spark Ads, for example, to boost the creator’s organic post as a paid placement. The ad still carries the creator’s name, face and engagement history, but the brand can apply its own targeting, budget and optimisation to it. And because it runs through the standard ads platform rather than a simple repost, performance is fully trackable end to end.

Because of this, allowlisted content is where most of the traceable money now sits. Brands are running more creator-generated ads year on year, pushing organic creator posts into paid placements where the targeting and the tracking both behave properly.

If your creator budget currently produces no trackable revenue at all, we can help you fix that before going near the harder forms of measurements, like vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics

Two to six weeks after a burst of creator activity, several things tend to move before revenue does: branded search volume, direct traffic, saves and shares, and the volume of user-generated content and reviews mentioning the product.

Branded search is the most useful of those, partly because it costs nothing to check and is very hard to fake. Set a baseline in Google Search Console before the campaign starts, then watch for lift in searches combining your brand name with the product.

Saves and shares deserve closer attention than likes, since somebody saving a video intends to come back to it. A report from Traackr’s 2025 data found nano creators drove a 35% rise in save and share rates, so smaller partners often generate the strongest intent signals even when the view counts may look unremarkable. We often recommend a variety of nano, micro and macro influencer activity for optimal influencer effectiveness, depending on the budget.

Compounding results

The slowest return is also the biggest one. Creator content keeps working long after the campaign window closes, because it has become part of how beauty products get discovered at all. So, if you look at your initial conversions and your vanity metrics and feel a bit down about the numbers, remember this content isn’t going anywhere. It’s now a part of the tapestry for people making related searches to your brand and product.

YouTube content appeared in 78% of Google AI Overviews for product comparison searches, according to a recent report. Novi’s study of 10.7 million ChatGPT citations between January and May 2026 found Reddit is the single biggest source ChatGPT draws on for beauty recommendations, ranking above Sephora and Allure. This data matches perfectly the data Foundation also reporting in our beauty AI SEO guide available here.

So when a shopper asks an AI assistant which vitamin C serum suits sensitive skin, the answer is assembled partly from creator videos and community threads your brand paid to start. A video posted in March is still earning its fee in November.

Make your research primary

Everything we’ve talked about is evidence more than proof, and proof needs a test.

The simplest test you could do is a post-purchase survey asking new customers how they heard about you, with individual creator names as options instead of one “social media” catch-all. Self-reported data is imperfect, but it still surfaces influence that no tracking pixel will ever be able to.

A regional holdout goes further. Run creator activity across most of the UK, deliberately hold it back in one comparable region, then measure the sales difference between them.

That gap is your incremental impact. Design one that stands up to matched regions, a long enough window, and clean baseline data, for example. But this is where it can get technical and a bit more complex. Speak with us if you are looking at your influencer activity and struggling to prove their value, because this is exactly the kind of thing that our teams can support you with.

creative meeting

Four things to set up before your next creator brief

None of the above suggestions require fancy platforms or a bigger budget. But it does require you to think more strategically. Before the next round of contracts goes out, think about:

  • Adding a “how did you hear about us?” question to your post-purchase flow, with creators listed by name rather than lumped under social.
  • Take a branded search baseline in Google Search Console now, so there’s something to compare against in three months.
  • Agree on the reporting window that goes further than just the month or two.
  • Brief creators on the language their audience actually search and ask, rather than your own campaign slogans.

The first two you could do this afternoon. The second two change how the whole programme gets judged, which is the harder but more valuable shift.

Give creator activity a fair trial length

Beauty brands that cut influencer budgets usually do it after judging a channel over two weeks that really pays back over six months. The activity gets pulled, discovery slows a quarter later, and nobody joins the two events up because the reporting never spanned long enough to show the link.

Measuring across these four areas takes more setup than reading a code redemption report, but it gives you something far more useful: a defensible case for the budget, and a clear view of which creators genuinely have impacted your brand awareness rather than simply posting about it.

Your best-performing creator of last year might be sitting at the bottom of your spreadsheet right now, for no reason other than the metric you judged them on.

We’d love to hear from you, get in touch today and we’ll have a member of our social and influencer team audit your current campaigns and how effectively you’re measuring them.

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Insights The Latest Look

Beauty digital PR: why real stories earn the coverage AI-written pitches never will

beauty PR woman selecting magazine shots

If you type “best retinol for sensitive skin” into ChatGPT then you’ll get a shortlist of five or six brands by name. No sponsored row, or shopping carousel, and no way to bid your way onto it. Beauty has always run on somebody else’s recommendation: the friend who won’t stop talking about a particular serum, the beauty editor whose verdict you really trust, the Reddit thread you read doom scrolling at 11pm, or the pharmacist who pointed you towards the £6 version.

That AI recommendations are now doing the same job at this, but at scale. This means the job for beauty marketers has changed scope- how to get your brand or product to rank for a particular keyword or key phrase now matters less than being recommended in the answers.

Beauty shoppers are always asking someone else

The beauty category has never been a simple solo or impulse decision. People ask before they buy, and they ask because the stakes feel more personal with greater consequences – for example, will your skin breakout? A foundation shade or an acid that might wreck your barrier, a £48 serum you’ll be living with for three months but has reacted badly to your skin.

These discovery and purchasing habits are now colliding with a big change in how search works. Pew Research Centre found in July 2025 that when Google showed an AI summary, users clicked through to a traditional result only about 8% of the time, down from 15% when no summary appeared. The beauty industry feels this faster than most sectors because so many beauty queries are advice-shaped rather than navigational. Like, does this work on 4c hair? What’s serums are safe to use in pregnancy? Is the e.l.f. contour dupe as good as the original? An AI answer handles all of these queries in one go, and the researcher never clicks through, they never actually reach your product page.

The money involved makes it worth paying attention to. The British Beauty Council’s Value of Beauty 2026 report put the industry’s contribution to the UK economy at £28.3 billion in 2025. A meaningful slice of that gets decided before anyone lands on a website at all…

What AI reads when it builds a beauty shortlist

Editorial coverage is the raw material

Muck Rack and Generative Pulse’s 2025 “What Is AI Reading?” analysis found that more than 95% of links cited in AI answers were unpaid, and around 85% of those were earned media. Ahrefs, looking at 75,000 brands in 2025, found that branded mentions across the web correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, which is a strong relationship by any standard.

Read that through a beauty lens and it’s pretty obvious.

The brands appearing in AI answers are the brands appearing in the likes of Cosmopolitan UK’s best-of roundups, in Get The Gloss ingredient explainers, in Refinery29 reviews and Which? Reviews testing.

Your paid social spend does not feed that machine. Your owned blog barely does.

Earned coverage does, which is why digital PR has quietly become a visibility channel rather than a brand-awareness nice-to-have it once was.

Beauty editors can tell when a pitch was written by a robot

Time pressure is a huge reason why AI-generated press releases may seem tempting. But the trade-off is worse than most people assume. Medianet’s 2026 Australian Media Landscape Report surveyed over 800 journalists and found 78% said AI-generated pitches lowered their trust in PR content, while 48% reckoned they could almost always spot an AI-written pitch.

Bare in mind, the same report found that 86% named press releases as their most-used story source, so the channel still works but it needs to be human-led. A features editor at a national paper who has had four generic “revolutionary skincare breakthrough” pitches from you is not opening the fifth, and no amount of volume will fix that, the interesting, unique angle will.

The angle is the thing AI can’t invent

Language models produce statistically likely phrasing, that’s why every AI-written beauty release reaches for the same vocabulary. Like revolutionary, game-changing, transformative, clinically proven or glow type phrases. Editors have read those words nine hundred times this month… and with the latest developments on watermarks in text, it’s only getting easier to prove this.

What earns coverage is material that only you have. Sales data showing a 300% spike in searches for barrier repair products after a particular TikTok trend, or your formulation chemist explaining why a trending ingredient doesn’t do what the internet says it does. Independent consumer research on how women over 45 actually shop, or a founder story with a real reason for existing behind it – these stories stand out.

Strong beauty digital PR is built on assets like these because they give a journalist something to write and therefore gives an AI something to cite. Ask yourself “what does your brand know or do that nobody elses does” then build the story out from there (rather than starting with the product).

Human PR writer

A 20-minute test you can run before your next meeting

Here’s something to try – open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews and ask each one the questions your customers may ask. “Best affordable vitamin C serum UK” “what should I use for postpartum hair loss” “cruelty-free foundation for oily skin”

Then check three things:

  1. Is your brand named at all?
  2. Which publications are being cited in the answers?
  3. Are your closest competitors there, and what coverage put them there?

That citation list is a media target list someone else has already built for you. It tells you exactly which titles carry weight in your category, which is a far better starting point than a bought media database.

Where this leaves your PR plan

AI belongs in your PR workflo- use it to summarise research, tidy a media list, spot a trend early or proof a draft at 6pm. Hand it the parts of the job that were never the valuable bit.

You should be keeping the angle, the data interpretation and the journalist relationships firmly human, because those are the elements that turn a story into coverage and coverage into citations.

The beauty brands winning visibility right now are not the ones publishing most often, they’re the ones giving editors something genuinely worth writing about.

We recently conducted our own independent AI in beauty research which is available here. We did a deep dive analysing which brands are being recommended, where AI platforms are actually sourcing their answers, for example Who What Wear, and what the data reveals about the gap between traditional digital authority and real AI visibility. We hope this white paper will help you to get your beauty brand winning in AI Search.

If your brand isn’t showing up when an AI is asked what works in your category, that’s a fixable problem, and it starts with earning coverage that deserves to be there.

Read the white paper above, and as a beauty digital PR agency, Foundation can help you build campaigns and stories that beauty editors actually want to read and AI models will cite.

Take a look at our digital PR services and let’s talk about getting your brand into the answers.

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Insights The Latest Look

Longevity-washing and the trust problem

Longevity marketing image

 Making claims people can trust 

Longevity has become beauty’s new favourite word. It’s on serums, body creams, supplements and treatment lists, and the science behind it is moving quickly enough that most marketing teams are writing claims faster than their labs can substantiate them. And consumers, who are getting very good at spotting the gap between a scientific-sounding claim and an actual result, have started taking notice. 

For industries like financial services, their marketing teams have a thorough checking routine most beauty teams would find exhausting. Every claim has to be evidenced before it even goes near a campaign, every statistic carries a named source, and compliance holds a genuine veto over creative. It looks painfully slow from the outside, and as our sister agency, Balance, can attest it can be troublesome, but it’s given finance brands years of practice at something the beauty industry is about to need badly…how can we regulate terms like longevity?  

Longevity and beauty marketing  

The term first escaped form skincare marketing and we’ve seen it with some of our own skincare clients, and the obsession over the word is real. Skincare marketing has since moved on and we’re seeing more in haircare products, make-up, even some fragrance ad copy. L’Oréal chief executive Nicolas Hieronimus described the shift in March 2026 as a “new era of science”.  

With the shift, naturally the audience has widened too. Terms like prejuvenation and collagen banking have pulled 20-somethings into a category that once spoke almost exclusively to women over 45, which means a single product now needs to make sense to two very different buyers. 

That growth has produced its own problem, and the industry already has a name for it. Longevity-washing describes products that borrow the vocabulary without carrying the evidence, and the temptation is easy to understand. Preventative benefits resist the before-and-after formats that beauty social thrives on, so brands reach for bolder wording to fill the gap. 

What the ASA will actually let you say 

The Advertising Standards Authority spent April and May 2026 working through a run of cosmetic anti-ageing rulings, and the pattern across them should worry any brand writing longevity copy. Holding data is no longer enough. The regulator wants evidence that reflects the finished product as it is sold, not the isolated active inside it, and it rejected a peer-reviewed paper from a major dermo-cosmetic brand on exactly that basis.  

 

Eucerin London Tube Ad

 

The ruling shows how tight the standard has become. The ASA found the brand Eucerin had not evidenced that exosomes, once formulated into a topical serum and applied to the face, produced the regenerative effect described, and it noted that unqualified claims such as “rejuvenation” are not generally acceptable for cosmetic products.  

Two further rules catch longevity marketing repeatedly. Every distinct claim needs its own evidence, so proof of improved texture does not license a claim about lifting. And any numerical or time-based claim, whether that’s a percentage or looking five years younger, needs instrumental data rather than purely consumer self-assessment and reviews. Something all brands should consider: audit your claims before someone else does it for you.  

Your customers are already sceptical 

The Fashion Institute of Technology’s Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing programme surveyed 1,654 beauty consumers in May 2026 for its Longevity of Beauty study, and the trust hierarchy it found is stark. Dermatologists and doctors are trusted by 75% of respondents and scientists by 67%, against a mere 5% for influencers.  

More uncomfortable for longevity brands specifically: only 14% said terms like NAD+, exosomes and epigenetics made a product feel more credible, while 32% read them as marketing language. It’s interesting to see that vocabulary that feels like proof internally, reads as just noise to a third of your audience.  

Timing expectations are the other trap- 42% of consumers expect visible results within a month, which is faster than healthy-ageing biology delivers, so a brand that stays vague about timelines loses believers by week four. 

 

AI systems are checking your homework too 

Research into generative engine optimisation (AI SEO), including a Princeton study presented at KDD in 2024, found that adding statistics to content lifted citation frequency in AI search results by 41%, and in contrast, if you don’t provide any statistics to back up your claims, you’re likely to get penalised: unsubstantiated claims without numbers or sources are among the things that actively reduce citation odds, while author bylines, organisation schema and consistent identity across can help web raise them.  

The LLM models weigh-up consistency across independent sources when deciding how confident they are to recommend a brand, which means a claim your own site makes, unsupported by press, reviews or expert coverage, simply does not get repeated back to the consumer. Our own independent research backs this up further,  showing that the AI’s source brand owned content just 7% of the time. 

The same FIT research found just 2% of consumers currently consult AI platforms for product reviews before buying. The behaviour that earns AI citations is identical to the behaviour that keeps the ASA satisfied, so this costs you nothing extra. Our SEO services team treats the two as one workstream. 

 What you can do next 

Here’s a couple of actionable takeaways we suggest you, as beauty markets do… 

Log into GA4 and pull your five highest-traffic product pages and read every efficacy claim on them, including the ones buried in the ingredient copy. Then put each through four questions: 

  • Does the evidence cover the finished formulation, or only the active ingredient in isolation? 
  • Would a consumer read this claim the way you intend it, or would they hear something stronger? 
  • Is every statistic sourced, dated, and based on instrumental measurement rather than how testers said they felt? 
  • Does the product name itself make a claim you would struggle to defend? 

The ASA applies the same substantiation standard to product names as it does to ad copy – a serum with “renewal” in the title is making a claim before anyone reads a word of the description. Anything that fails a question gets rewritten or evidenced properly. Nothing stays live on the strength of it having always been there. 

Secondly, make credentialed experts a visible part of your brand, not just a footnote in your marketing. Start with quotes to back your claims, then build up to real faces and video content across your website and socials, the more visible the expert, the more credible the claim. 

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Insights

Where AI gets its beauty recommendations from

Searching on a computer
Women searching on laptop

When someone asks ChatGPT which foundation to buy, they probably assume the answer is coming from somewhere authoritative. Maybe a beauty expert, a clinical study, or at the very least a reputable publication they recognise. The reality is a little more complicated, and for beauty brands, it matters enormously.

AI tools are now a primary discovery channel for product recommendations. The customer journey that once ran through Google, then to Vogue, then to a product page is increasingly shortcutting straight to the AI answer. Which means if you want to show up in that answer, you need to understand what AI is using to find its sources.

We ran our own research to find out, and what we found had some surprises.

What our own research showed

We ran 20 beauty prompts through four major AI platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Prompts ranged from “What’s the best foundation for dry skin?” to “Best vegan makeup brands available in the UK”. The kinds of questions real shoppers are genuinely asking AI platforms.

Across three rounds of testing, we recorded 683 citations, we categorised each source by type, and looked at which domains came up most often.

The headline finding: editorial coverage matters the most. Across both rounds of testing, 42% of all citations came from what we classified as editorial or glossy publications like Vogue, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Who What Wear, Marie Claire, Byrdie, and Glamour, and these were the publications which all appeared consistently. A further 31% came from SEO blogs and general web content.

Reddit ranked as the single most-cited individual source across both rounds, appearing 39 times in total. That’s more than Allure (24) and Vogue (23) combined. YouTube, Cosmopolitan, and Who What Wear also featured heavily.

Brand-owned content, like your own product pages, brand blogs, brand directories, accounted for just 6% of citations across the dataset.

How each AI platform sources differently

Not all AI tools behave the same way, and the differences are meaningful.

Gemini was the most citation-heavy platform in our research, averaging around 10.8 sources per prompt response. It leaned heavily toward editorial content (52.8% of its citations) with Reddit and TikTok both featuring prominently. It appears to weight prestige publications highly when forming beauty recommendations.

ChatGPT showed a similar editorial preference (42.7%), with Reddit appearing 16 times as its most-cited individual source. It also surfaced YouTube frequently and drew on a broad range of glossy titles.

Perplexity was notably different. It showed the most balanced spread across source types, with editorial (30.5%) and SEO/blog content (31.1%) roughly equal. Retailers like Boots appeared far more often here than with any other platform, 29 of the 80 retailer citations in our dataset came from Perplexity alone. It also cited brand-owned content more than any other platform (9.6%). This suggests Perplexity is more willing to treat commercial sources as credible.

Claude behaved very differently from the other three. It cited fewer sources overall, averaging 5.6 per prompt compared to Gemini’s 10.8, but showed a distinct preference for SEO and blog content (58.4% of its citations). Crucially, it returned zero social or forum citations across the entire dataset. It also cited content it described as coming from its own training data on five occasions, which no other platform did. Claude appears to be the most conservative and least editorially driven of the four.

What the wider research says

Our findings sit neatly alongside what other studies have been showing.

Muck Rack’s “What Is AI Reading?” report, which has now analysed over 25 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, found that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations — and that this figure has remained consistent across three editions of the study going back to July 2025, ranging from 82% to 89%. Paid and advertorial content accounts for just 0.3%.

In beauty specifically, an analysis by Goodie covering 135,419 beauty and personal care citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity found that editorial publications like Byrdie, Allure, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan provide the expert-vetted recommendations and award validation that AI leans on most heavily, and that their “Best of” lists effectively become the scaffolding for AI recommendations. Reddit ranked first overall, present across all four LLMs and pulling from both posts and threads.

The brands that appear in AI answers are not getting there through their own content. They are getting there because the sources AI trusts have written about them.

What this means for beauty brands

If a beauty brand is not appearing in Vogue, Allure, Byrdie, or Cosmopolitan or being discussed on Reddit, it is largely invisible to the AI tools that an increasing number of shoppers are turning to for recommendations.

Brand-owned content like your product pages, your blog, your press releases are not what AI is reading. Across our research, they accounted for just 6% of citations. That is not zero, but it is not significant, it should be a gauge to show where to recalibrate where marketing effort is directed.

Research from 2025 suggests that content structure matters too, with AI models extracting 44% of citations from the first 30% of a page and rewarding content that leads with a direct, clear answer rather than building to it. You can read more about this here.

The Muck Rack data adds a PR-specific angle worth noting: the first seven days after publication generate the highest citation rates in both ChatGPT and Claude, and half of all citations across models come from content published in the last 11 months. Recency is a live variable. Past coverage fades. A placement from 2022 is not doing the same work it once did.

For digital PR services, this is a genuine opportunity. The brands consistently appearing in AI beauty answers are not the ones spending the most on paid media. They are the ones with sustained editorial presence in the publications that AI actually reads.

Where to focus your marketing efforts

Our research and the wider evidence point toward a consistent set of priorities for beauty brands that want to appear in AI-generated recommendations.

Editorial coverage in tier-one beauty titles is a non-negotiable.

Vogue, Allure, Byrdie, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire dominate citation lists across every platform we tested and every study we reviewed. Getting into those publications, consistently and repeatedly, is the single highest-leverage activity for AI visibility.

Community presence on Reddit

This matters more than most brands realise. It was the top-cited source in our dataset and appears in the top tier of every major platform. Organic brand presence in relevant subreddits, through honest reviews, real conversations, and community engagement, feeds directly into AI answers.

Retailer presence is platform specific

Boots appeared prominently in our Perplexity data specifically, suggesting that brands with strong retail visibility on Boots.com may have an advantage on that platform. For makeup brands with a broad retail footprint, this is worth monitoring.

Be on YouTube

Video content is being cited more than most beauty marketers expect. It appeared 15 times in our dataset, more than most individual editorial titles, suggesting that long-form video reviews are being indexed and referenced by AI in ways that shorter social content is not.

Next steps

The brands that understand this shift are already adapting and winning. They are investing in editorial relationships, building community presence, and thinking about digital PR not just as a brand-building tool but as an AI visibility strategy. The ones still optimising primarily for traditional search rankings are playing a game the rules of which are changing rapidly.

What we’ve found in our research is that AI beauty recommendations are not neutral. They are a reflection of what the media has said, what communities have been discussing, and what editorial gatekeepers have endorsed.

The question for beauty marketers is not whether AI will shape their customers’ decisions, we know and have proof that it already is. The question should be whether your brand is in the room when those recommendations are being made. We can help you make that happen, contact us to today to discuss your AI visibility strategy, we’d love to hear from you.

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Insights

What SPF shoppers want in 2026 and why so many brands are missing it

SPF lotion sun design
SPF sun lotion

The suncare category has seen massive growth and is predicted to grow a further 33% before 2030, according to Mintels 2025 suncare report, and in the UK alone, 59% of sun protection users report wearing sunscreen most days. In this blog we talk through why there are so many opportunities for brands within the SPF category, how searches for SPF have changed and how SPF brand marketers can make sure their brand is visible in this crowded, but opportunistic category.

Why “SPF” isn’t a good enough claim anymore

For years, SPF marketing focused on protection credentials. SPF 30 versus SPF 50, broad spectrum coverage, water resistance, dermatologist testing. While these claims remain important, they are no longer enough to differentiate products in an increasingly crowded category. Consumers are looking for products that fit their skin type, lifestyle and personal preferences.

For beauty brands, this shift reflects a broader trend across the category. Consumers are becoming more specific in the way they search, and more selective in the way they buy.

How SPF searches are changing

One of the clearest examples can be seen in SPF related search terms. Queries such as “SPF for oily skin”, “SPF for sensitive skin” and “SPF with no white cast” have become common entry points into the category. These consumers are trying to solve a particular problem, and they expect brands to help them find the right solution quickly.

This presents a challenge for brands still relying on broad category messaging. Product claims such as SPF 50, broad spectrum protection and dermatologist tested, remain important, but they rarely answer the questions consumers are asking during the consideration stage.

Take oily and acne prone skin as an example. For many consumers, concerns around the shine, texture and possible breakouts sit equally alongside concerns about sun protection. The decision making process often centres on how a product feels throughout the day, how it performs under makeup and whether it fits well within an existing skincare routine. The same SPF may be suitable for multiple skin types, but the way it is presented to different audiences can have an important impact on engagement and conversion. This is backed up by research by Mintel in their 2025 UK suncare report, that the sensorial trends (referring to nice to use textures and appealing scents) hold a lot of opportunity for SPF brands- 61% of sun protection users are interested in a wider variety of fragrances. Consumers are willing to spend more on products that enhance their mood and make sun protection application more enjoyable.

Consumer expectations continue to rise

The growing influence of sensitive skin consumers highlights a similar pattern. Ingredient transparency, formulation details and clinical reassurance have become important parts of the purchasing journey, particularly as skincare knowledge continues to increase. Consumers are spending more time researching products before making a decision, and many expect brands to provide clear information that helps them evaluate suitability for their individual needs.

Social proof within the SPF category is important than ever

The conversation around white cast has followed a similar trajectory. While the industry has made progress in formulation and inclusivity, consumers continue to look for visual proof that products perform well across different skin tones. Product imagery, creator content and user generated reviews often play a critical role in building social proof and thereby trust before purchase. For many consumers, seeing a product in use provides more reassurance than any product claim.

Evolving customer needs

At the same time, changing consumer needs are driving demand for new formats, including climate adaptive and cooling products. UK weather patterns are changing, our summers are getting longer and hotter, so there’s an opportunity for brands to create and position climate-adaptive products that resist sweat and humidity.

The popularity of sticks, mists, powders and cushions reflects growing interest in products that fit seamlessly into everyday life. Consumers understand the importance of reapplication, but convenience remains a major factor in whether that behaviour happens in real life.

As a result, brands have an opportunity to market these products around real time moments and considered routines rather than focusing exclusively on technical features which can be harder to differentiate from competitors.

A growing category creates more opportunities for SPF brands

SPF brands need to protect themselves against the threat of makeup and skincare products. Despite more products having SPF included, according to Mintel, explicit SPF products are still the go-to. SPF brands are leaving opportunities on the table by not launching adjacent categories, like lipcare, which is outperforming other beauty categories, and base makeup with SPF which would be an easy crossover for SPF brands to help them move into the colour cosmetics category.

The influence of K beauty

The influence of Korean beauty has also shaped expectations across the category. Much of the discussion around K Beauty SPF centres on texture, wearability and skincare benefits. Consumers increasingly expect SPF to feel like an extension of their skincare routine, and those expectations are now influencing purchasing decisions across the wider market.

Taken together, these shifts point towards a larger change in consumer behaviour. Beauty shoppers are moving away from category level purchasing and towards need based purchasing. They are using search engines, social platforms, AI models, and creator content to find products that address specific concerns, often before they engage with a brand directly.

A content and SEO opportunity

For marketers, this creates opportunities that extend beyond product development. Search terms reveal the language consumers use, the barriers they encounter and the questions they need answered before making a purchase. Some of the top searched for terms include “can sun tan lotion expire”, “best sunscreen for face”, and “how often should you apply sunscreen”. Brands that build content around those search insights are often better placed to capture attention during the research phase and guide consumers towards conversion.

SPF remains a highly competitive, but lucrative category, but competition is no longer defined by product performance alone. Increasingly, success depends on how effectively brands connect products with the needs consumers are actively searching for. The brands gaining traction are those that understand the motivations behind those searches and use them to shape everything from their content strategy and creator partnerships to product positioning and customer journeys.

For marketers, looking at consumer search behaviour provides a clear indication of where opportunities exist to make your brand highly visible to the in market consumer. As shoppers become more specific in what they want, brands have an opportunity to create content, campaigns and products that address those needs directly. The brands that do this well will find it easier to stand out in a crowded market and connect consumers with products that fit their routines and personal preferences.

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