SEO is dead. AI is taking over search, and if your beauty brand isn't optimizing for generative engines, you might as well pack up your products and go home. At least, that's what an increasingly vocal corner of the marketing industry would have you believe.
The reality, fortunately, is considerably less dramatic.
As beauty brands finalize their 2027 strategies, the conversation around generative engine optimization (GEO) has shifted from existential panic to practical execution. Consumers are increasingly turning to AI platforms for product recommendations, but that doesn't mean brands need to abandon everything they've learned about traditional search.
In BeautyMatter's latest webinar with Stella Rising, John Morabito, SVP of Search and Innovation, unpacked the evolving relationship between SEO and GEO, sharing proprietary research into how beauty brands appear in AI-generated answers and what marketers should prioritize next.
For years, dominating Google meant securing a coveted position on the first page of search results. Now, brands face a bigger challenge: convincing AI they're worth mentioning in the first place.
According to Stella Rising's research, 82% of branded Google searches now trigger an AI Overview, while 62% of pages cited in AI Overviews don't rank among the top organic search results. But Morabito cautioned against treating GEO as an entirely separate discipline, particularly when companies are rushing to capitalize on the industry's uncertainty.
"The messages of 'Hey, SEO is dead,' and ‘GEO is the only thing you need to think about’ [...] are usually predicated by people who are actually trying to sell you something," he explained.
Purchasing another sophisticated platform won't necessarily solve the problem. "Ultimately, what you need to do is do the work behind it. No tool is going to do that work for you."
Stella Rising's research examined 9,589 prompts, 67,000 AI-generated answers, and about 400,000 citations, revealing a competitive landscape in which established retailers hold significant influence.
Among the standout performers was Ulta Beauty, generating approximately 335,000 retail citations compared with Sephora's 200,000. "Thirty-one percent of all questions are answered with Ulta [Beauty] present across this big beauty set," Morabito revealed.
But Ulta Beauty's success isn't exclusively attributable to its product pages. The retailer has invested in hybrid category pages combining shoppable products with extensive educational content addressing specific consumer concerns.
For beauty brands accustomed to optimizing product descriptions and hoping for the best, they must do more. Across the dataset, educational guides, blogs, and reviews accounted for 40% of cited sources, compared with 22% for product detail pages and 13% for category listings.
The findings also reinforced the importance of earned media, with editorial content accounting for 34% of makeup citations, 28% of skincare citations, and 24% of fragrance citations.
Yet visibility alone isn't the ultimate objective. "It's moving from essentially being mentioned to recommended," Morabito explained. "We don't want to just be mentioned. We want to make sure that we understand the share of that answer that our brand owns, as well as whether or not we're being named first."
In other words, appearing in an AI-generated shopping list is one thing. Becoming its first recommendation is another.
If AI search has a beauty type, it's apparently someone with credentials.
Morabito highlighted CeraVe as an example of effective product page optimization, pointing to its detailed descriptions of skin concerns, named dermatologist endorsements, and third-party certifications.
"You can't just say ‘dermatologists recommended’ on the page," he explained, emphasizing the importance of connecting claims to identifiable professionals.
"Literally having a picture of a dermatologist with them saying ‘my [brand] name, dermatologist name, and I recommend this product’ can help establish authority,” he added.
Clinical studies, ingredient explanations, and credible third-party validation can strengthen a brand's chances of appearing in AI-generated recommendations.
The research also identified changes in where platforms source information. Reddit remains influential within Google's AI Overviews, but its presence in ChatGPT citations has declined significantly in Stella Rising's analysis.
"Every one of these engines has its own citation diet, if you will," Morabito explained. That makes a one-size-fits-all GEO strategy increasingly difficult to justify.
While the industry obsesses over AI, another search transformation is happening in plain sight. Stella Rising's survey of 511 beauty shoppers found that six in 10 had used TikTok search, while four in 10 sometimes searched TikTok instead of Google.
"Social video is already a search engine. It's not becoming one," Morabito said.
His analysis of top-performing Instagram Reels found that 92% named a product within their opening sentence, 72% used a tutorial format, and 63% opened with a result or named technique.
The implication is that brands should stop treating video optimization as an afterthought. According to Morabito, brands should be creating videos that answer a question or provide a solution.
Rather than simply showcasing products, content should address specific concerns, demonstrate solutions, and use language consumers are actually searching for.
For smaller beauty businesses, the question isn't whether GEO matters, but where limited marketing budgets will deliver measurable returns.
Morabito's answer was refreshingly pragmatic. "I would still pick SEO," he said when asked which discipline he'd prioritize if forced to choose.
"I think we all have to report back to someone how much this thing made for us, and SEO is still the more direct response, measurable channel."
AI-generated recommendations may influence purchases, but tracking their direct commercial impact remains challenging. "Very few people actually click the links in an AI answer. It usually kind of stops there," Morabito explained, with consumer activity often continuing through other channels.
His advice was to establish a baseline for AI visibility while maintaining investment in proven search strategies.
For beauty brands, the takeaway is reassuringly straightforward: The brands most likely to succeed aren't necessarily those chasing every new acronym. They're the ones making themselves genuinely useful, credible, and easy to discover.
