INSEAD Professor | Human x AI Brand Leadership | Digital & Data Transformation around the Customer | Luxury, Immersion & Brand Elevation
If you're not in the model, you're not in the market: do #ChatGPT, #Gemini, #LlaMA, #DeepSeek & #Claude know about your #brand? And if so, what do they think about it? Answering these questions requires not just new metrics—but a new mindset. Our latest Harvard Business Review article offers a sneak peek into what it means to market to #LLMs (large language models), in an era where #AI increasingly intermediates #consumer-#brand relationships: 🔹How AI brand awareness works—and why it increasingly matters(there is no “page 2” on ChatGPT) 🔹 Why brand valuation is shifting from share of search, to share of voice, to share of model 🔹 How to diagnose and close the Human–AI brand awareness gap 🔹 What kind of content LLMs actually surface, and how to tailor your strategy accordingly Big thanks to my stellar coauthors Jellyfish's John Dawson & Akansh Jaiswal, to Jack Smyth for your tremendous support, to #HBR's Alana G. & INSEAD's Lee Seok Hwai 李淑淮 & Nick Measures and #for your help! Link to article in comment David Jones Julie Hardy Raphaëlle Daoglio Hiren K The Brandtech Group Mailine Swildens Francisco Veloso Sameer Hasija INSEAD Alumni Association INSEAD Executive Education INSEAD Lifelong Learning #AI #MarketingStrategy #BrandManagement #GenerativeAI #LLMO #AEO #DigitalTransformation
This is a super good and thought-provoking article, thanks for sharing David Dubois! The rise of LLMs for product discovery is indeed significant and I'd like to add that a product like AI Overviews (https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/) blurs the line between conversational AI and core search, as it integrates AI-powered answers directly into search results. While adapting to these new pathways is essential for brands, many foundational principles remain consistent. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), for instance is vital for both an LLM's recommendations and organic visibility.
Thank you David Dubois for this very Useful framework in a very quickly changing search environment. A little suggeation , perhaps, in terms of marketing terminology : SOV is much wider than Share of Model and includes all media. I suppose it will include share of model too.
Very insightful! David Dubois Are there any indications whether LLMs distinguish between content about a brand found on owned channels vs. third-parties/earned content?
Hey Professor, thanks for sharing! Will go through this and would love to pick your brain in detail sometime regarding this. Cheers
Very interesting take! Totally agree on the growing role of LLMs in brand visibility. On Share of Search, though, it’s important to note that it’s not significantly controlled through SEO or SEM. Those may help amplify results, but the true driver is the brand’s mental availability, shaped by the full marketing mix and broad reach channels that put the brand in people’s minds before they even type a query. So high Share of Search isn’t about optimizing for search, it’s about earning the search in the first place.
My startup got recommended to someone through ChatGPT completely out of the targeted geographic region and they ended up becoming a customer. It was just a stroke of luck as I had not done anything specific to make this happen so I believe it is a result of my previous efforts at SEO. How can it be replicated? Isn’t it the same principles as SEO?
Most brands are optimizing for human algorithms when AI is already rewriting the rules of brand discovery. Your HBR piece nails a critical blind spot: we're still thinking in "share of search" terms while LLMs are becoming the new brand gatekeepers. But here's what separates winning brands from invisible ones - it's not just about being "in the model," it's about how systematically you've structured your digital presence for AI interpretation. The shift isn't from share of search to share of model - it's from optimizing for human browsing behavior to optimizing for machine pattern recognition. What scares brands more: being unknown to consumers or being misrepresented by the AI that increasingly speaks for them?
Thanks for sharing David Dubois.
INSEAD Professor | Human x AI Brand Leadership | Digital & Data Transformation around the Customer | Luxury, Immersion & Brand Elevation
3mohttps://hbr.org/2025/06/forget-what-you-know-about-seo-heres-how-to-optimize-your-brand-for-llms