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Large language models (LLMs) provide a search experience that’s dramatically different from the web-browser experience. The biggest difference is this: LLMs promise to answer queries not with links, as web browsers do, but with answers. Increasingly, using apps such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, or search portals such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (now AI Overviews) or Bing’s Copilot, customers will learn about products and brands through natural-language outputs. And that process, which will be highly consultative and conversational, will create a new information pipeline that marketers need to monitor to ensure their brands are presented for relevant prompts and described accurately. The authors present three ways for marketers to rise to this challenge.
For millions of consumers around the world, Google is the access point to the internet — and as a result, the company today enjoys a 9src% market share in the $50 billion market for search ads. However, thanks to the advent of large language models (LLMs), a shakeup now seems possible for the first time in two decades.