When your client asks ChatGPT what to use, will your brand be the answer?

L'Oréal have signed a partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and most of the industry scrolled straight past it as another AI headline. I understand why. There is an AI announcement every other week at the moment, and the fatigue is real. This one is worth stopping on, though, because underneath the corporate language is a very clear picture of where beauty discovery is heading, and which brands will be found when it gets there.

Let me walk you through what actually happened, and more importantly, what it means for the independent brands most of us stock, sell, and recommend.

What L'Oréal actually did

The headline was a broad "AI partnership", which tells you almost nothing. The part that matters is specific and easy to miss (and it has not been widely reported in plain terms): L'Oréal are now feeding their own product information directly into ChatGPT.

Until now, when someone asked an AI tool what to use for their skin or hair, the answer was assembled from whatever the model had been trained on, which is to say a mix of product reviews, Reddit threads, blog posts, and wiki pages of varying quality. L'Oréal have decided they would rather not leave that to chance. So when a consumer asks ChatGPT about one of their products, the tool will increasingly pull from L'Oréal's own notes rather than the open internet's best guess.

Alongside that, Maybelline is building its virtual try-on directly into ChatGPT, and brands including CeraVe, SkinCeuticals, and Garnier are part of an early advertising pilot inside the platform. The direction is unmistakable. L'Oréal are treating ChatGPT as a place where beauty is discovered and bought, not simply a novelty.

Why they are moving now

This is not a company chasing a trend for the sake of it. L'Oréal are moving because they can see something in their own data that should concern all of us.

Beauty brands are already losing website traffic as consumers stop Googling and start asking AI instead. According to Gartner, nearly one in five people now use generative AI tools to find information, and personal care brands are among those already feeling the drop in visits. When the place people go to ask questions changes, the brands that get mentioned in the answers change too, and L'Oréal have decided they want to be in those answers before the behaviour becomes the norm.

It is a sensible, well-funded, entirely predictable move from the largest beauty company in the world. Which is exactly why it should prompt a conversation for everyone who does not have their budget.

What this means for the brands you stock

Here is where it becomes real for the professional channel.

When a client asks ChatGPT what to use for their pigmentation, or the best treatment for damaged hair, or which vitamin C serum is worth the money, the AI gives them an answer. That answer is drawn from whatever the tool can read, understand, and feel confident recommending. If the large players have fed their information in and made themselves easy to interpret, and the independent brands have not, you can probably guess whose products come up.

This is the part that sits uncomfortably with me, because the brands a lot of us truly love and recommend, the independents and the salon-professional lines, do not have a L'Oréal budget or a direct line to OpenAI. So they are at real risk of going missing in the exact place clients are beginning to look for advice. Not because their products are worse, but because they are harder for an AI to find and describe.

For a channel built on expertise, trust, and the professional's recommendation, that is worth taking seriously. The recommendation is starting to happen somewhere new, and many of the brands we champion are not present in that conversation yet.

What you can actually do about it

The good news is that the answer is not to out-spend L'Oréal, which would be impossible and is not the point anyway. The answer is to become findable and legible to AI, which is a great deal more achievable than a multi-billion-dollar technology partnership.

AI can only recommend what it can read and understand, and right now most independent beauty brands are close to invisible to it. Fixing that comes down to the same foundations that make a brand clear to a human being, applied with AI in mind:

A website that states plainly who the brand is for, what it does, and what problem it solves, in language a machine can parse rather than marketing poetry that means nothing out of context.

A properly maintained Google Business profile, accurate directory listings, and a steady flow of genuine reviews, because these are among the sources AI leans on when it builds an answer.

Consistent, specific language across every place the brand appears, so the tools encounter the same clear story wherever they look, rather than a different description on every platform.

None of this is glamorous, and none of it is new. It is positioning, messaging, and discoverability, which is the unglamorous groundwork that has always decided whether a brand gets chosen. AI has simply raised the stakes and shortened the timeline.

The window is now

The brands that do well over the next few years will not necessarily be the ones with the best advertising. They will be the ones AI can find, understand, and confidently recommend when a client asks. L'Oréal have seen that clearly enough to act early, and the independents we work with have a genuine, but narrowing, window to get ahead of it.

If you are not sure how legible your brand (or the brands you stock) currently is to the tools your clients are starting to use, that is exactly the kind of question worth answering now rather than in a year. The behaviour is already changing. The brands that prepare for it, rather than react to it, are the ones that will still be in the conversation.

Inside Industry works with professional hair, beauty, skincare, device, and aesthetics brands on the positioning, messaging, and discoverability that decide whether they get found and chosen. If this raised a question about where your brand stands, that is a conversation worth having.