A Large Language Model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence system trained on massive amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text. LLMs power popular AI assistants like ChatGPT (GPT-4), Claude, Perplexity, and Google's Gemini.
For marketers and SEO professionals, understanding LLMs matters because:
- LLMs decide which brands to mention in their responses
- Training data influences which sources are considered authoritative
- Content structure affects how well LLMs understand your information
- Citation patterns reveal what LLMs consider trustworthy
Key LLM concepts for marketers:
- Training data: The text corpus used to train the model
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): How LLMs pull in real-time information
- Prompt engineering: How users interact with LLMs
- Model parameters: The model's capacity to understand nuance
The most prominent LLMs affecting brand visibility include GPT-4 (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta).