We are all becoming more impatient. Why trawl through ten tabs, review sites and Reddit threads when you can ask an LLM (learning language model) one question and get an answer in seconds,

Which is why I think the concept of ‘Share of Model’ is becoming really interesting. We’ve spent years talking about Share of Voice, Share of Search and ultimately how these both ladder up into Share of Market. But if AI is fast becoming the recommendation layer of the internet, then surely we need to start thinking about how brands can effectively show up inside these platforms too.

A recent piece of research from WARC & Charlie Oscar has got us thinking about this at Piqniq HQ. Specifically, the idea that two-thirds of LLM visibility is driven by long term brand equity, with marketing spend coming in second at 22%. At first glance, it’s not really all that surprising. Strong, established brands have always benefited from being searched more, talked about more and embedded in cultural conversation. But I think it’s starting to feel different as LLMs are starting to surface those associations back to consumers in real time.

And it’s not just about whether or how often your brand appears, but what it appears as the answer for and who it appears next to. We know awareness and fame alone have never really been the ultimate end goal. They’re only really valuable to a business if they actually move people closer towards changing their behaviour. What LLMs seem to be doing is highlighting the existing memory structures and perceptions around brands, instantly.

If you ask an LLM for  “wedding guest dress brands” (peep my recent search history) or “luxury holiday resort”, you suddenly start seeing which brands own the premium space, which brands feel trustworthy, which brands offer the best value & ultimately which ones are even relevant enough to show up as an answer. It’s basically the internet’s collective perception of your brand being played back to you and this is where I think this gets particularly interesting from a media perspective.

It makes fame driving channels even more important because they create the recognition, salience and cultural conversation that shapes how brands are remembered and discussed over time. But equally, community environments also matter massively because they shape how people talk about your brand, not just whether they remember it exists in the first place.

AFPs and sponsorships feel especially powerful here because the brand isn’t just simply sitting passively around the content, but is ingrained in the content itself. The brand becomes part of the narrative, the conversation and the context that both people and machines learn from.

It really does feel like we’re entering an age where media need to deliver for both humans and machines. Won’t be long before client briefs start including not just a target audience, but a target machine objective too. All in all, slightly terrifying, although I can’t pretend I’m not already treating ChatGPT like my own personal Ask Jeeves half the time…