Three beauty brands, three very different stories. 👀

I ran a skincare brand-health report on ATTENT10N to see how three popular skincare brands look from a brand-health perspective. What drives their visibility in AI?

CeraVe was built to be the dermatologist’s drugstore brand. Reddit’s r/SkincareAddiction made the Moisturizing Cream the default answer to “what should I buy for sensitive skin,” and the brand leaned all the way in, riding the skin-barrier discourse and the slugging trend. The 2024 Super Bowl spot with Michael Cera — yes, that pun — turned subreddit consensus into mainstream cultural awareness. They wanted to own “dermatologist-recommended” as a positioning. Now when you ask AI for the best moisturizer, the most-trusted brands, or what dermatologists actually suggest, CeraVe shows up first.

The Ordinary launched in 2016 with one of the boldest theses in beauty: list the ingredient, price the molecule, skip the marketing. The Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% serum became a meme on Reddit. Their community — the Skintellectuals — built itself organically on Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube, with creators like Susan Yara and Lab Muffin. Recent expansion into haircare and hyperpigmentation has only deepened the cult of the ingredient list. AI describes them as transparent, ingredient-focused, budget-friendly, targeted treatments. The community energy is still there.

Drunk Elephant was the cult skincare brand of 2018. Tiffany Masterson built it on the “Suspicious 6” thesis. Shiseido acquired it for $845M in 2019. Then everything stopped working. The slugging trend favoured ceramide-rich barrier brands, not chemistry stacks. Pilling and irritation complaints multiplied. The 2023 cultural-appropriation backlash hit hard, and tweens spawned their own anti-Drunk Elephant meme cycle. AI describes Drunk Elephant the way they were at their peak — clean, clinical, biocompatible. But the community is not interested. Brand substance has to keep generating new substance, or AI’s scoring models think you are less relevant.

Each brand’s story and strength matches their performance from an AI visibility perspective.

  • Drunk Elephant has the strongest technical setup of the three (all AEO tactics) — and the weakest performance.
  • The Ordinary has hardly any AEO optimisation. They show up in twice as many AI responses as Drunk Elephant.
  • CeraVe sits between the two structurally (some AEO tactics and a strong brand) and ranks highest at 68% visibility, with a community that won’t stop recommending them.

Brand = 70% of AI performance. Structural tactics (AEO) = 30%.

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