Is AI Replacing Google for Beauty Shoppers?

Yeah. So the teams put together a fantastic report about AI search, what's happening in the beauty and cosmetics sector. So this sector is is huge valued at over $450 billion. It's a big global industry and continues to grow now. The interesting findings though and there's lots of them. So I highly recommend digging into the report are around how people are actually searching for beauty, cosmetics, skinare, hair care, all of those types of products. now and 37% of consumers are already searching in AI for these. So that's chatbt, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, pick your favorite of those. And 27% of UK shoppers are already buying via AI agents, which we'll come on to later if you haven't heard about what an AI agent actually is yet. So pretty heavy influence of AI influencing these purchase decisions. Hello and welcome to the dojo research marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. My name is Dale Davies. I'm the head of marketing, Exposure Ninja, and I'm joined by our CEO, Charlie Merchant. Hey, Charlie. How you doing? Hey, Dale. I'm doing great, thanks. How are you? Pretty good. It's going to be warm for me over here. I'm uh slowly just taking off layer by layer. In a few weeks, I'll probably be an exposure ninja branded vest if that's okay. Yeah. And a cap and a sunnies. Yeah. One of their branded sunnies would be amazing actually. Um what I think we we come to talk about a brand new report that the team has put together. Um you know more about it than I do I believe. Um it's about the beauty and cosmetic sector. Is that correct? Yeah. So the team's put together a fantastic report about AI search. What's beauty, cosmetics, skin care, hair care, all of those types of products now. And Gemini, Perplexity, Claude. Pick your Isn't now is that AI usage within like social media platforms? Are we calling that just the AI platforms themselves like chat GBT or Gemini and so on? Yeah, we're talking about chat GBT, Gemini, AI chatbot platforms, and also AI overviews in this report. The summaries that are AI generated that appear on the main Google search results page at the moment. Okay, 37% sounds like like actually quite a bit more than I was expecting. I thought it was going to be like a slow adoption thing. It might be lower, but it's quite quite high, you know. I maybe even feel the opposite that it's not high enough or not as high as I thought it was because I use chat GPT for almost all searches that I personally do relating to this sector for things like skin care, hair care, all of that. Color analysis which is very sort of top of funnel. I use chat GPT for all of that as well. Chat GBT is is basically my Bible when it comes to everything in this sector. I wonder if how much of it is impacted by people going off personal recommendations and whether people are kind of making a slow transition to I can get it customized to myself because I just observing you know makeup side of Tik Tok having like investigate like one of our uh uh teams accounts recently where they make recommendations I tried this one it's great because my skin is like this whether people are like so used to uh way of finding the right thing for them that they just haven't tested it just yet. Maybe I would even The real question here is uh what what you're up to watching makeup videos on TikTok. That's what everyone actually wants to know. Tail it's the inquisitive, you know, analyst side of me. I can't help but just study people, you know, how social media works, how video works, how marketing works, that kind of thing. I could just had to have a little cheeky look. Um I've thrown you off. What was your question? I don't know anymore. Well, I just wonder is this do you think um a sign of the direction in which people are going in terms of using AI more in this sector? Well, I think personalization is huge in this sector. It's shopping for cosmetics, beauty products, makeup, all of that type of thing is very personal. And we all have different like hair types, skin types, complexions, tones, all of that. So, actually, generic advice is generally not ideal. And if you're reading generic advice online, it it gets really annoying quite quickly because you're trying to filter through such a large amount of information. And actually, one of the findings in in this report was that around 80% of people abandon searches when they're searching traditionally using Google search results because they can't find the answers that they actually want to the specific questions they have. And I think personalization has always been pretty large in this sector because we've got things like um The Ordinary global skincare brand. They have a very very famous skincare regimen builder because even if you know that you want to buy from the skincare brand like the ordinary you go to their website and there's a huge number of products. So you still as a consumer if you don't already have a product that you're using that you definitely know you're just going onto the site to buy that specific product but you're actually in research phase and you're trying to build a skincare regime that works for you. It's really overwhelming. So I feel like brands in this sector, the clever smart switched on brands have been thinking about personalization way before AI even came on the scene because things like the regimen builder actually allow you to go through select things like what type of skin that you have, what kind of problems that you have, you know, if you have acne, if you have dry skin, if you usually wear SPF, if you are concerned about aging, all of that type of thing to then get personalized product recommendations. And it's the same for other brands in this sector. So, Only Curls, I actually have curly hair. Usually, it's straight now, but it's usually curly. Only Curls does exactly the same thing. They have a a quiz page where you go through, you're like, "This is my hair type." There's like a million different curl types, and then they recommend you the types of products based on your curl pattern, based on if you have dry hair, if you have oily hair, if you have combo, all of that type of thing. So, I feel like the smart brands have already been thinking about personalization. And for consumers, AI is kind of the next level of that because now we can do things like just take a photo of our skin and upload it into traction and ask for recommendations. And kind of what you alluded to there about how much of this comes through personal recommendations from our friends or family, people we know. And I think a lot of that plays into it. I know that I myself do a lot of searching specifically personalized to me. But then if I get a chatbt answer that recommends Nivea or The Ordinary or Sarah Vee, all of those are brands that I know and trust from my family and from my friends. So I'm more likely to pick them in a lineup of five brands that AI has recommended if I actually recognize them. So I feel like that really comes into it when you're close to making a purchase decision. I have many questions off the back of what you're just saying. I suppose one of the first ones is that if I'm in a marketing leadership position where I have to make a judgment call on where I dedicate my budget, is it going to be to building out these like regimen builders where my products are like the only option which is obviously perfect for me to get our product line, our new product releases in front of people, whether I should dedicate my continue to dedicate my budget there or to put it into trying to hope well put it into making my brand appear in AI answers where it's a 50/50 chance if it might be or a 20% chance that it might be mentioned. Like, do I dedicate to where I can guarantee I mentioned or where I hopefully will be mentioned? Oh, I love this question. And I think it's not that simple. It really depends on who your competitors are and how well you're known your brand is. The the ultimate answer is you want to do all of it. Ideally, you want to be able to build something like that that's a content asset to your website that people know and rave about and go to. But if you are competing with a brand like The Ordinary and they've already got a huge regimen builder and you're a medium-sized business, you're you're more of a mid-market player than a global player, I think it's going to be very difficult to knock them off with something like that on your own website. So you're more likely, I think, to do well optimizing for AI searches on Chat GPT, for example, for the niche of products that you actually have and then making sure that your website's well structured so that when someone comes to it, it's quite easy to navigate between the different products that you have. And I also think one of the reasons that we see brands as big as The Ordinary and Only Curls doing things like these quizzes or these regimen builders is because they've got hundreds of products. And the more products you have, the more confusing and overwhelming it can be for a customer on your website. So, you need ways to funnel them through. But if actually, say you've got five main hero products and they're quite clearly divided of who they're for and what they do, it might not be that you need to be building something like a a huge quiz or regimen builder on your website. The great thing about building those is reducing that overwhelm if you have a large product stack or your product stack isn't clearly delineated into what it does and who it's for in some kind of way. And the other amazing thing about it, of course, is because it does recommend all of your own products, you can put email streams off the back of it. So, you can have automated emails. You segment your target customers that are coming to the site based on who they are, what their preferences are, and then you can send more personalized marketing to them over the long term. If you offer subscriptions, you can then push them into subscription purchases as well. You know, get your retinol every six weeks or however long it is to top up X, Y, and Zed. Oh, it's summer season, time for your SPFs. That type of email marketing you can do really well. So, I think it's a little bit about where the business is. Are you at the stage where actually you need just more customers coming to the website and you need to start thinking about not just your Google search but your AI search or are you at the stage where you've got large amounts of traffic coming to your website and you need to divide where those customers are doing are going and push them for repeat purchases over time. So are you suggesting that it really depends on like the size of business that I am that I should either go for trying to prioritize one hero product or maybe a category like a small category out of like five or six you may have versus like if I have the money to do so going all in on brand because I think what you're trying to say there is that you want to make sure your brand is recommended regardless of the category line like if I'm looking for SBA I want my brand to come out Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you're not in the recommendations, right? You're not pushing any traffic through from those sites. You're not getting referral traffic from chat GBT or Gemini. And you're not covering that part of the top of the funnel of those 37% that's for now, right? Consumers who are using AI for those recommendations. Quite a large chunk of the market to be ignoring. And when we talk about the recommendations from AI platforms, you mentioned in there on one point about AI overviews. Are we putting those at the same level within the same category of AI search or are they were we attacking that problem in a different way? So optimizing for AI overviews, we're tackling a little bit differently. So these are the AI summaries, right, that show up on the Google search results, and they show on around 36% of beauty queries. Um, which arguably makes them more important than ranking number one organically for some of those types of terms because their overviews often show above the 10 blue links above the organic search results that we're used to seeing. Um and the data from this report is also showing that 45% of marketers in this sector reported there was an increase in traffic after they appeared in the AI overviews which there's a lot of arguments in the sector in the SEO sector I mean around whether AI overviews truly influence traffic and conversions and I think in this type of search in beauty searches where people are actually trying to solve problems they're trying to do comparisons between different products they're trying to understand what products they can use together sometimes as well particularly if we're talking about skinare or hair care it makes a lot of sense that actually if AI can answer the question and it pushes towards a brand that you know or recognize and quite a lot of the time we see product images in AI overviews in this type of sector as well it's not just a text result that we're getting so I think there's a huge amount of brand stickiness and I do think there's going to be increases in traffic for optimizing for AI overviews. But this is very much a different product uh project that you would be undertaking in your marketing as part of your SEO work. You'd be thinking about okay, what keywords show AI overviews that are relevant to me? Are they top of funnel, middle of middle of funnel, even sometimes AI overview stray into bottom of funnel searches as well. Which ones do I want to own? Which ones am I already in? and then which ones have I already got a position roughly 1 to 10 organic ranking for because if you're in the one to 10 already, you are much more likely to be able to own a position in the AI overview. So, it's really a project to decide which ones have the commercial intent that you want to show up for or that you feel like are part of the top of funnel that leads buyers through to actually purchase what you sell. My understanding of the beauty sector is that while there are e-commerce elements to it and you will get purchased through your website, it's very much dependent on like omni channel strategy. You have to be everywhere and mostly to kind of aid a instore purchase. This all so far sounds very much like research stage and trying to understand which is the best product for me to make that purchase online. But is it also impacting how people shop internally? We also factoring that into it or is this purely a online how we push people through the funnel or a system through the funnel rather than push through the online. Probably one of the biggest conflicts going on in a lot of these brands are the ones that have in store and the ones that have online components to the business, right? because they're often measuring separately the total number of sales coming through each, but actually they they aren't siloed at all. They absolutely influence one another and particularly online as well. So some of the other findings in this report were that actually 20% of shoppers avoid buying online because they find product descriptions really confusing and 29% I think this is crazy going into physical stores to get the details that they can't find online. Imagine going into a store. That's huge. Almost 30% of the people to read the label on the bottle on a shelf instead. What a waste of time. It just makes you think, imagine if these brands had extremely clear product descriptions online that answered all of those questions. It so much more likely to get the purchase immediately because I don't there are going to be people that want to browse in store. That's always going to be part of the beauty buying experience. But there are also going to be people who are just trying to answer the questions that they have before they make the purchase as well. But yes, it's very much omni channel. I think all of this AI searches, AI overviews, traditional SEO, our product descriptions on our e-commerce stores, the email marketing, things like regimen builders, they all actually influence what gets purchased both online and offline. And some consumers, particularly when it comes to skincare, hair care, makeup side of cosmetics, are going to want to go into Boots or Superdrug and actually see the products and find the thing that they think that they want. But most of the time they're not going in there completely blind because I don't know if you've been into a Boots recently. I find it one of the most overwhelming experiences ever because there's about hundred different skin care brands and you think I'm just trying to find a bottle of retinol and there's there's thousands of products and they all try and make themselves look a bit different but actually a lot of them look quite similar. So, in a sea of boots stands and there's 500 other shoppers in there on a Saturday, I can think of way better ways to be spending my time than going in there. But it definitely influences it, right? I already know what I'm going in to buy. And I know that because I've researched it online. The reason I'm not ordering online might be even small things like I couldn't find all the information. I decided I didn't want to pay the shipping fees because I just need this oneoff product at this oneoff point in time. Lots of different reasons. I I can relate to your experience recently having gone into a boots and tried to find something and it was near impossible. But as part of my market research and analyst kind of side, I also went into like Huty and a few others to just kind of see like how they all compare to each other. And there's a Sephora opening in a few weeks too. and and I'm gonna go and investigate that because I'm really curious about like how they they this they saw at the store but a lot of it as you say comes down to like the brand like how well understood the brand is and yes the kind of execution of how strong the descriptions are um and how everything ties together in terms of like your social team acting the you know the impression the customer has of the brand. But I suppose one of my questions right now is are people still buying like in beauty at the moment? Like it's a category that kind of fluctuates over time and it goes up and it goes down depending on like how the economy is doing. If I'm I mean my first question is is the buyer still behaving today as we kind of expect them to be in terms of they're still buying you know the same number of products and the second part of the question is seeing as we are kind of in a mini recession or an unspoken recession that don't say the rword kind of period where it's not official should I be dedicating time to this if my buyer might be pulling back on their spending at this point in So this is interesting actually because the beauty sector is a little bit more resilient than we might think. So UK shoppers beauty spending has increased year on year. So 2025 it was higher than 2024 up to something like £324 for the average UK shopper per year with I know people who spend thousands by the way. So, I think that's fairly conservative where it's weighed down by probably shoppers like you, Dale, who maybe buy like the odd SPF or moisturizer every year. Yeah. Once or twice a year. So, that average is uh maybe a little different, but that's up from £291 in 2024. And one of the theories around this as why it's up is because it actually gets driven by what's kind of called the lipstick effect. like this culture of buying ourselves a little treat despite like big economic pressure going on. So instead of buying things that you might buy whilst the economy is booming, whilst you know you feel like you're doing really well, whilst the cost of living isn't a good space, you might actually at those kind of times be buying more expensive luxurious things like a big holiday abroad or a really nice handbag or something like that. And what tends to happen in a recession or like concerns around economic downturn that kind of pressure cost of living isn't so great for most of us is the lipstick effect where we move towards buying like smaller more affordable luxuries i.e. lipsticks or similar types of cosmetic products which actually means that this sector can boom in difficult times because people are more likely to treat themselves on a smaller scale. So less holidays, more hair care going on. So either way, we should still be dedicating our kind of attention, resource, strategy, planning to appearing in AI search because regardless of how the economy is going, people are going to buy something. Absolutely. And I also think there's there's a thing, right? We build things like our own skincare regimen. They don't suddenly just stop because there's a recession. Like we don't all stop wearing our SPF in August just because there's an economic recession. Like some of these products are also what we kind of think of as need-based. Like people believe and in some cases definitely do like things like SPF are pretty non-negotiable in the summer for the majority of people. there's a there's a segment a component of it where people are going to make those purchases because that is the type of product stack that they always buy the same way that they buy certain foods at the supermarket every week as well. And then there's going to be things like, you know, new makeup releases, new eyeshadow palettes, which are more optional. I know not everyone feels like they're optional, but technically they are. That perhaps are going to be coming into those like little treats, something that's new, something that's exciting, something that feels like you're treating yourself. So, I think there's kind of two types of purchases and purchases potentially that really happen during this period. So, yeah, definitely not a time to be taking a foot off the gas when it comes to selling in this sector. And looking more long term, how do you see this uh area developing between your AI search within the beauty sector? Oh, this I think is the really interesting part of this sector and what I alluded to earlier when we first started talking around actually shopping agents having AI shopping agents purchasing for us. So, if 27% of UK customers, I think that's huge, are already using AI agents to make purchases autonomously. Hands off. They're just letting them letting them go make these purchases happen. And those agentic shoppers, they're projected to account for around 10 to 20% of US e-commerce purchases by 2030. That's only like four years away. So, this is growing quite significantly. And I think it's actually a lot of the brands in this sector who are really leading the way with it. Particularly also sites on Shopify integrating checkouts into Chat GBT so that consumers just have a much quicker easier time. I think a lot of this will also be down to things like people roughly know what they want and there's some repeat purchases that happen outside of subscription models. So just having AI agents actually autonomously go and solve those problems. And I think a lot of this will integrate into the the types of top offunnel conversations we have in AI platforms like chat GPT. Here's the skincare problem I have at the moment. I want to solve it. Find me a solution. Get it posted to my house. I don't want to spend any more time dillydallying in boots to try and figure this out. I recall looking at Google Marketing Live, which is one of their big events each year where they mostly talk about, you know, the the ad side of things, but they also talk about like the functionality of Google search, is they were showcasing how you could make fashion purchases by just, you know, uploading a photo of yourself and then it would allow you to kind of mock up how you would look in those dresses and then you just have to press like buy and it would do the functionality of putting in the shopping cart and well, I you have to do that yourself, but it would just complete the purchase for you. Make sure you got the right size and all that kind of thing. And I think like the evolution of that is as you say the regime part of the re recommendation tool is within Google itself that you can just give it a photo of yourself, find me x, y, and zed and just send it off on its way to make those purchases rather than you having to spend forever just scrolling through the shopping list of here's 10 different prices for the same thing and here's a few things you haven't considered and so on. Well, and these AIs basically are acting as super researchers, right? They're cross-referencing what the brand says about itself, what your website claims about itself with third party sources, with what people are saying on Reddit, with what medical journals might have published, with what Cosmo and Glamour's new top 10 list of lipsticks for the winter season looks like. It's definitely spring and summer now, but you know, whatever. all of that type of research which people do and I think there will definitely because this sector some people enjoy shopping in this type of sector right it's a weekend or like downtime after work activity people want to actually follow purchases they want to follow what's happening in here I think there will always be cross referencing with things like Tik Toks with what your favorite influencer is sharing they'll be watching reviews on YouTube so very much omni channel for those types of shoppers but I also think As personalization increases, we will start to delegate more of this because if we're if our Google's all hooked up, for example, suddenly Google knows what you've been purchasing because it can see your Gmail history. It knows what you've added to cart because you're getting those emails about you've left this in your cart. Do you want to check out now? All of that type of information is going to actually mean the types of search results we get over the long term become more and more personalized more and more actually like what we want the brands that we buy from regularly. It's going to be so much easier to start delegating to AI agents, shopping agents to do some of this work for us because it's already got so much information about our personal shopping preferences. So just hearing about choosing different makeup and different lipsticks on the season. I always kind of love those uh for me is a complete revelation. You know uh I absolutely love and adore it. When we were doing the marketing deep dive video for Sephora, which you'll find in the show notes as well as in description on our YouTube channel, is I learned uh that people have seasonal like scents as well, different fragrances. to like something that's maybe a bit more warm coming through into like autumn and winter whereas I just wear the same Tom Ford all year round. I'm just like, "Wow, that's fascinating. I never knew maybe I need to mix it up a bit." Um, but like there's a lot of really interesting statistics in this report and if you'd like to get a copy of it yourself, you can go to exposioninja.com/beauty and you'll find a lot of like, you know, information about how the sector is changing. There's also some recommendations in there, but for anybody who hasn't the opportunity to read it now, Charlie, are there any recommendations you would give to them on how they should approach um AI search or AI search optimization and just this this change to the category going into the rest of Yeah, definitely there's there's lots more than the scope of the next five minutes to cover for this type of question, but my top level takeaways would be things like firstly understanding where your current AI traffic and conversions is coming from. You can split that out in a channel group in your Google Analytics to get an idea of, you know, if Chat GBT traffic and conversions are increasing for you. Based on what we've seen with skincare brands that we've worked for, there is definitely an increase in chatbt traffic and conversions happening for most brands in this sector. So worth checking that. Then I would say thinking about the categories you really want to appear in when people search on AI. So what your mainstay hero products actually are that you want to be competing on, what your highest profit margin lines actually are that you want to be showing up on and who your actual competitors are for those products, making sure that you are then being compared to the right type of brands by AI as well. So for most businesses in this sector, you're going to be running an e-commerce site. Those product descriptions we spoke about earlier, making sure they are so clear, so clean is going to be incredibly huge. thinking about comparison content. And then probably the biggest recommendation is thinking about your PR outside of your own website as well. Thinking about what other people say about your brand online and thinking about getting the products that you really want to do well in AI search featured in lists that AI is likely to recommend. You can do that generally by doing some searches for those products in chat, checking the sources, reading through, seeing what kind of magazines, articles, Reddit sites, forums, review sites actually come up. Superb. Well, I'll have make sure that the report is linked down below in the description for this podcast episode or um where it's published elsewhere around the internet. um as well as a few other useful videos and podcasts on the sector itself uh which will help you navigate through these uh changes and how the category is kind of evolving. Um and thank you so much for joining us this week. You'll find more on our website. go to exposing.com as well as over on YouTube and our podcast as well as filled to the brim with everything you need to know about AI search optimization and how to do the various parts of it including how to figure out the prompts to track, how to uh do the the research into competitors, how to uh increase your number of mentions around the web on your improve your on-site stuff. Everything is taken care of there. So, head over to exposioninja.com or to our YouTube channel. Thanks and we'll speak to you all next week. Bye bye.