RCMA Makeup lands first retail partnership with Ulta. The third-generation, family-owned brand enters beauty retail for the first time in its over 60 years in business with an online launch. November 9, 2026 Associate Editor, Happi RCMA Makeup, the professional makeup brand founded in 1963 by makeup artist Vincent JR Kehoe, has launched online at Ulta via Ulta Beauty Marketplace. It is the first beauty retail partnership in the brand's 63-year history. "After more than 60 years serving the professional community, RCMA is excited to extend our formulas to more consumers," said Christian Kehoe, co-owners of RCMA Makeup. "We've been one of the industry's best-kept secrets, and we feel it's time to change that." A reputation built backstage. For more than six decades, RCMA has been found primarily in the kits of working makeup artists, available through professional channels and the brand's own website. The company has reportedly never advertised. Its reputation was built backstage and on set, passed between artists working in film, television and theater, where its complexion products quickly became a quiet standard and a go-to among some of the industry's most respected makeup artists. Through word of mouth and generations of professional use, RCMA has cultivated a loyal following within the makeup artist community, earning its place as an enduring industry insider favorite. Ulta Beauty reportedly approached RCMA, identifying the brand as a fit for the professional category within its curated Marketplace assortment and an opportunity to expand its professional makeup offering with a brand trusted by makeup artists for decades. RCMA formulates and manufactures its products in-house in California, where many are still poured by hand. The company remains family-owned and is run today by the founder's grandsons. "For us, it was really about finding the right retail partner. What we love about Ulta is that they serve such a broad range of beauty customers, from people who are just discovering makeup to the pros themselves," said the Kehoe family in a joint statement. "That's an authentic fit for RCMA." Product assortment. Nearly the full RCMA range will be available on Ulta.com, including the brand's cult-favorite No-Color Powder; 5-Part Palettes; Summer Lights Illuminating Balms; and its latest launch - the Red Carpet Ready Multimedia Liquid Foundation. Red Carpet Ready, co-developed with Academy Award-winning makeup artist Justin Raleigh, brings RCMA's complexion expertise to a liquid format. It is available in 48 shades across three undertone families. The formula is buildable from sheer to full coverage, dermatologist tested, vegan and cruelty-free. Add us as a preferred source on Google. Get the latest Happi news, insights and analysis in your Google Search and AI experiences.

How to check if AI recommends your business. You can check whether AI recommends your business in one week, without an enterprise tracking platform. Ulta Beauty treats agents as voices it cannot control and can only inform, while Bolt is tracking how often chatbots name it so new content can win more answers. Searchable's argument, reported by PPC Land, is that a brand left out of those answers can lose customers to rivals without seeing it happen. Updated November 8, 2026 Key Takeaways * Ulta cannot control agent answers; it can only shape what recommenders know. * Log buyer prompts monthly; one test is not proof. * Allow search crawlers, then inspect five revenue pages. * Track qualified demand, not chatbot mentions alone. Why do AI answers change who gets found? Thinkpeak's GEO guide says generative engine optimization is SEO plus three jobs: let AI search crawlers in, publish pages worth quoting, and measure citations. It cites a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults. Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside an AI summary. Alphabet said in its Q2 2026 earnings call that AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly active users. OpenAI says ChatGPT is used by more than 1.2 billion people every week. Google says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, with visitors more likely to spend more time on the site. How do you check if AI recommends your business? Kelly Mahoney, chief marketing officer at Ulta Beauty, said at the Status Summit, "We say we want to be the best marketers to our consumer, but we also need to be the best marketers to the agent," according to MarketScale. The brand does not write the recommendation. It can only shape what the recommender knows. Searchable's November 6, 2026 announcement says Bolt will track how often chatbots name it on buyer questions, such as an airport ride, across the UK, Germany, Poland, South Africa and Thailand. The team will use those findings to see where new content can push ahead of rival apps' AI visibility. PPC Land notes the release does not mention paid placements inside ChatGPT, a price, or a baseline for how often Bolt is named today. Entrepreneur turns the same idea into a spreadsheet. A recommendation can change with the question, location, timing and context, and different tools generate different responses. Treat the log as directional research. One test is not proof that a business is universally invisible. * Write five to 10 prompts from sales calls, emails and proposals: a category question, a problem question, a comparison and one that names your market. * Keep branded prompts separate from discovery prompts. * Test the wording in more than one AI search experience. Log prompt, platform, date, cited source, competitor, opportunity and whether your site is cited. * Repeat the same set monthly and look for gaps that persist. What should you fix before adding content? Inspect five revenue URLs before you add pages. Use Google Search Console to check indexing, and look for a noindex directive, a broken canonical tag, restrictive robots rules, weak internal links and text that is not readable. Assign each issue to a named owner with a completion date. A page must be indexed and snippet-eligible before it can appear as a supporting link in AI features. No schema package guarantees a mention. Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Disallow GPTBot and ClaudeBot. OpenAI's documentation, cited by Thinkpeak, says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers," and each setting is independent. Thinkpeak's check is curl -A "OAI-SearchBot" -I against the site, confirming a 200, because a plugin can block the agent before robots.txt is read. OpenAI notes changes can take about 24 hours. Remove nosnippet or a restrictive max-snippet on key pages. Rewrite the first 100 words so they name the audience, problem, service and outcome, under one H1. On each of five revenue pages, answer one pre-quote question in the first sentence of an H2. Explain price variables rather than inventing a price. Replace "industry-leading" with evidence a buyer can check. Thinkpeak's summary of a KDD 2024 paper found keyword stuffing scored below the unedited baseline. Check that your business name is consistent in reviews and directories, match it on a marketing-aligned website, and do not use AI-generated articles as a stand-in for proof. How do you tell a mention from demand? "I don't think there's a playbook, so it's really stepping through this. But you can't wait. It's here," Mahoney said. She also said "all of this is measurable." MarketScale's suggested test is to pick one problem, such as acne-prone skin, and ask whether owned content, associates and creators would produce the answer an AI agent judges best. Bolt's release gives no baseline for how often it is named and does not mention bookings. Measure qualified demand, not just mentions. Repeat the unbranded prompts monthly. Frequently asked questions. Does generative engine optimization replace SEO? No. Thinkpeak describes it as SEO plus three jobs: let AI search crawlers in, publish pages worth quoting, and measure citations. Unindexed pages are rarely retrieved. Do small teams need a paid visibility platform? Not to start. Entrepreneur's method is a spreadsheet of prompts, platforms, dates, cited sources and competitors. Bolt's Searchable deal states no price and no baseline. What if you block OAI-SearchBot? Thinkpeak cites OpenAI's documentation: sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Training-crawler settings are separate. How should you judge whether recommendations improved? Repeat the same unbranded prompts monthly and measure qualified demand, not mentions alone. Mahoney said she does not think there is a playbook, but that the work is measurable.

EXCLUSIVE: Whoop to enter Ulta Beauty. The health tech company will launch its wearable fitness trackers online and in select stores in March 2027. November 3, 2026, 12:01am Ulta Beauty is launching wellness trackers. The specialty beauty retailer has joined forces with Whoop, the Boston-based health tech brand best known for its wearable fitness trackers, to launch a selection of products online and in certain Ulta stores beginning March 2027. The launch comes as Ulta continues to bet bigger on wellness, with the retailer unveiling new Wellness by Ulta shops-in-shop in January, and recently adding several well-being-focused brands to its assortment including red light therapy brand HigherDose; sexual wellness ranges Maude and PlusOne; telehealth company Midi, which has a supplement line, and more. For Whoop, which has millions of members and in March was valued at $10.1 billion during a $575 million Series G funding round, the expansion marks a first foray into specialty beauty retail. "Our partnership with Ulta Beauty represents an exciting opportunity to introduce Whoop to millions of new consumers," said chief commercial officer Kyle Leahy, who most recently served as CEO of Glossier prior to joining Whoop this year, in a statement. "As Whoop continues to grow beyond our roots in elite sport, we're seeing incredible demand from people who want to better understand their health and improve how they feel every day. Ulta Beauty gives us an entirely new platform to reach those consumers, bringing together sport, health and life in a way that makes Whoop more accessible than ever." Whoop products launching at Ulta include the Whoop 5.0 and the Whoop MG, both of which assess a range of health markers and are meant to be worn like wristwatches. The Whoop 5.0 is available at two membership tiers: One, which is priced at $199 a year and offers sleep, strain and recovery insights as well as personalized coaching, VO2 Max & heart rate zones, and women's hormonal insights, and Peak, which is $239 a year and includes additional health span and pace of aging measurements, plus health alerts and stress measurements. The Whoop MG is available at a Life membership tier, which is priced at $359 annually and includes all the benefits of the 5.0, plus blood pressure insights, AFib detection and ECG capabilities. An additional assortment of Whoop bands and accessories will also launch at Ulta as part of the rollout. "We see this [expansion] as the beginning of a much broader relationship, with opportunities to collaborate on new products and experiences that help more people take control of their health," Leahy said. Whoop was founded by chief executive officer Will Ahmed in 2012. Its most recent funding round included participation from 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority, Mayo Clinic, Abbott, Bullhound Capital and other firms, plus prominent individual investors including Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Niall Horan, Karen Wazen and more. The brand, which also offers a nascent apparel assortment, ships to 61 countries and sells via retailers including Target, Best Buy, Dick's Sporting Goods, Amazon, PGA Tour Superstore and more. Newsletters