Coty partners with Brandlight to boost brand visibility in AI search
Key takeaways
- Coty has partnered with Brandlight to help its brands appear more often in AI-generated beauty recommendations.
- Early pilots improved Coty’s content, product pages, and digital PR, which raised visibility when shoppers search by need instead of by brand name.
- The deal adds to Coty’s wider AI push as more consumers use chatbots and AI assistants to decide what beauty products to buy.
Coty has announced a strategic partnership with Brandlight, an AI visibility platform, to help its brands show up more often in beauty search results from AI assistants and generative AI search platforms.
The deal aims to strengthen how Coty’s brands are discovered as consumers increasingly turn to AI tools for beauty discovery instead of traditional search engines.
Under the partnership, Coty will accelerate its Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) capabilities. The company’s brand teams are set to gain new tools and insights to help them adapt as consumer discovery habits change.
Coty says early pilot work with the platform has optimized content, product detail pages, creator assets, digital PR, and launch toolkits. This optimization boosts how often Coty brands appear in AI-generated recommendations.
The company says the optimized digital assets also help improve visibility when people search for needs or concerns rather than specific brand names.
“AI is redefining the rules of attention, discovery, and influence. Our ambition is not simply to keep our brands visible in this new world, but to make them impossible to overlook, ensuring they reach the most relevant audiences and meet a variety of beauty needs,” says Markus Strobel, executive chairman and interim CEO at Coty.
The partnership arrives as consumers progressively use AI tools, like product recommendation chatbots or virtual shopping assistants, to make beauty purchase decisions. Beauty brands are now facing raised stakes to ensure their products remain visible in the alternative avenues consumers are flocking to, or risk becoming “invisible.”
“Consumers don’t always start with a brand name. They start with a need, a preference, or a question — and increasingly, they turn to AI for recommendations,” says Imri Marcus, CEO at Brandlight..webp)
Consumers are increasingly turning to AI tools instead of traditional search engines for beauty discovery.
“For iconic brands, the opportunity is to be part of that answer. We’re partnering with Coty to turn its deep understanding of beauty and consumers into a stronger presence in the moments that shape discovery and choice.”
AI rises for visibility
Coty’s partnership with Brandlight builds on its wider AI transformation work, showing the company’s commitment to staying ahead of emerging technologies and consumer trends.
Earlier this year, Coty partnered with Pencil, a generative AI marketing platform. Their goal was to position AI-produced content at the center of Coty’s Consumer Beauty divisions to enable more efficient content production on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, a playbook from 5WPR describes AI search as the new first step in online beauty discovery.
In July, the company released an AI Beauty Authority Index 2026, which found that derma care brands like Drunk Elephant, La Roche-Posay, and SkinCeuticals led AI recommendation rankings across tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Additionally, Novi, a data infrastructure platform, found that Reddit, Who What Wear, Wikipedia, and Sephora are the top sources ChatGPT cites when making beauty recommendations.
“Research shows products with verified trust signals, like certifications and badges, are presented to shoppers significantly more often than products without them,” said Kimberly Shenk, CEO at Novi.
