Berenberg Study Shows L'Oréal's 'Dominance' in AI Product Discovery

02:59 AM EDT, 09/29/2026 (MT Newswires) -- Berenberg's new research found that L'Oréal's (OR.PA) proprietary beauty data and strategic partnerships helped make the company's products the default recommendation across major large language model systems. "L'Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus has ambitions of establishing the beauty bellwether as 'the reference source of knowledge for all LLMs'. Findings from our survey of 2,000 female LLM users, our simulation of 1,850 beauty-related prompts on ChatGPT, and discussions with five industry experts increase our confidence in L'Oréal's ability to achieve this objective. LLM search favors the big, in our view, and L'Oréal has established a clear first-mover advantage through next-generation partnerships, sophisticated digital strategies, and an industry-leading data moat," analysts said Monday in a note focused on the beauty industry. A Berenberg simulation demonstrated L'Oréal's "data dominance," with its recommendation share outperforming its global market share by almost 13 percentage points, with the company owning four out of the top five most recommended brands. The research firm said deals like its OpenAI partnership offer L'Oréal early strategic access, while its 16-petabyte data lake feeds structured clinical research to LLMs, ensuring AI engines cite the company before its competition. Against this backdrop, analysts reiterated their buy rating on the stock and raised their price target to 447 euros from 442 euros, citing their confidence in L'Oréal's ability to maintain a 6% medium-term growth trajectory.