Every marketer dreads bad reviews of their brand. Now with the rise of AI-powered chat programs like ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama 2 and Microsoft’s Copilot, marketers must prepare for the worst words about their brand to be repeated as answers to search queries.
Since large language models (LLMs) will soon answer billions of search queries each day, every marketer must know what these models think about their brand.
More advanced marketers are starting to track an entirely new metric: Every good CMO knows their share of the market, but do they know their “share of model”? Measuring how each model perceives your brand, compares it to competitors and why it suggests your products to customers will become an essential responsibility for every marketing team.
Here are the three things to do now to ensure LLMs understand what makes your brand unique, and why your product is worth considering.
First impressions last
Every AI researcher will warn against expecting a model to behave like a human. But they don’t have to sell cars, coffee and credit cards for a living.
The easiest way to understand the implications of an AI-everywhere world is to look at how customers behave today. When you want to check whether a brand is reputable or relevant, you often visit its website. And, with every major language model soon connecting to the open web to answer queries, they will do that too.
Even the most iconic brands will struggle to change (or even see) the historical training sets for the foundational models that will soon power the majority of the internet, from search queries to content playlists, product recommendations and customer service. So, every single piece of content you control outside that training set becomes a vital opportunity to advocate for your brand and your products.
This is why reviewing creative assets is the first step for brands preparing to measure and optimize their share of model. Just as search engine crawlers look for keywords and cues in your metadata, every asset you’ve ever published online could be part of a model’s reasoning for the next review.
The only way to understand what the model will think is to see every single piece of content from its perspective. Humans may like your Instagram Reels, but do they teach models that your cars are reliable? Those exquisite long-form recipes on your website may help your page rank, but do they seem a tad indulgent for an LLM’s taste?
