The Ordinary shook up the beauty aisle when it launched in 2016 with affordable skin-care formulations built around a single active ingredient, like hyaluronic acid or caffeine. A decade later, that approach appears to be helping the Est\u00e9e Lauder-owned skin-care brand in a new era of beauty consumption.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to data from 5W AI Communications, The Ordinary tops the list of beauty brands surfaced in AI citations. The brand\u2019s products appeared in 7% of responses to beauty-related consumer prompts submitted to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Skin-care brands largely dominated the top results, with CeraVe and La Roche-Posay also in the top five brands by AI citations.<\/p>\n
Those results speak to a new discovery model where LLMs like ChatGPT and Google Gemini prioritize ingredients and expert credentials to surface product recommendations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBrands are using ingredient transparency. They\u2019re talking about their dermatologist credentials,\u201d said Ronn Torossian, founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications. \u201cAnd that is what AI engines like to see: more detail, more description, more facts.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent months, beauty retailers like Sephora and Ulta Beauty have announced partnerships with tech giants<\/a> like OpenAI and Google, respectively, to integrate AI into their platforms. Those partnerships are growing as AI threatens to upend traditional search as a primary discovery path: According to a September 2025 report from digital marketing agency WSI, 58% of Google searches<\/a> result in zero clicks to external websites.\u00a0<\/p>\n Among primarily makeup brands, Charlotte Tilbury was the top brand by AI citations, appearing in 4.5% of AI citations, thanks in large part to its\u00a0Magic Cream, Pillow Talk and Flawless Filter products. The brand has been a standout in Puig\u2019s portfolio; according to the Spanish conglomerate\u2019s first-quarter 2026 report published in April, like-for-like makeup sales grew 9.2%, largely driven by Charlotte Tilbury sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n While 21st-century brands like Rare Beauty and Drunk Elephant also cracked the top 10, legacy brands were largely absent from the top brands cited by AI. According to 5W\u2019s data, Est\u00e9e Lauder was the highest-ranked legacy beauty brand by AI citations, ranking No. 18.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are legacy brands that are in deep trouble in every single industry,\u201d said Torossian. \u201cThis is a completely new world. And one of the challenges traditionally big companies have is they\u2019re more resistant to change.\u201d<\/p>\n Torossian anticipates that more brands will invest in tactics to boost their AI presence in 2027. That includes building out more detailed product citations on their websites, publishing more original research, and producing more video content to create the kind of information that LLMs pick up.<\/p>\n But much of the data picked up by LLMs like ChatGPT is outside of brands\u2019 direct control. According to 5W, Wikipedia pages and Reddit forums, like r\/SkincareAddiction, r\/MakeupAddiction and r\/30PlusSkinCare, are also commonly cited in AI beauty search queries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Consumers using AI have also, in some cases, shown greater readiness to spend. According to Amazon, consumers who used the retail giant\u2019s AI chatbot to make a purchase between November and December 2025 spent 80% more<\/a> than those who did not. In its third-quarter 2026 earnings report published in May, The Est\u00e9e Lauder Companies stated that, despite overall skin-care sales remaining flat, net sales at The Ordinary were up double digits.\u00a0<\/p>\n