AI Chatbots are a new form of answer engine, and as people use these tools more and more, they turn to them to answer questions that Google would have in the past. In particular for gathering information about a topic – and this will include product research.

To get in front of this coming wave brands need to think about how they can ensure their brand and products are represented within LLMs. For smaller, younger, and up and coming brands however their is one big problem.

Foundational Models Value Size Over Almost Anything

In almost every category of software recommendations the foundational models underpinning chatbots default to large, well established brands when making recommendations. It's not just that they favour these large brands though, they favour them overwhelimgly, and in almost every context.

Marketing Automation Software

Taking marketing automation software as an example, we see that HubSpot is a very clear number one choice. Not only is it consistently recommended, it is recommended almost exclusively in the number one position. In this instance HubSpot is probably not a bad recommendation.

Where things get more interesting however, are in the number two and three positions. Marketo almost entirely dominates the number two position, and Pardot is almost exclusively in number three. I don't know a single marketer that would recommend anyone either of these two products in 2024.

Both brands are still 'large incumbent' brands, but Marketo has more or less been abandoned by Adobe, and Salesforce doesn't even call their offering Pardot anymore. Neither of them are really valid choices for anyone other than some enterprise organisations at this point. Because they have been very large brands that have existed for a long time, and are associated with even larger brands (their owners) they are still recommended highly.

Notable exceptions, are up and coming brands like Klaviyo, which in 2024 would be a top three recommendation for most marketers. While they are becomming a large brand, they haven't been a large brand for very long, and so they don't even register as a valid recommendation.

The Learning

If your company is in the scale-up phase, has only recent become a 'a big brand', or you're riding a current trend, then you're starting off on the back foot when it comes to AI Chatbots. Similar to building backlinks in SEO you need to focus on building up brand mentions in large publications (ideally those that AI companies have partnerships with), and associations with other big brands to build yourself up as large incumbent player in your category if you want to earn recommendations.

The Silver Lining

As AI Chatbots and Generative Search tools get smarter, they aren't just relying on the foundational data they're trained on. They're also searching and crawling websites from around the internet to get more current information on topics. While small brands will probably never win at the foundational layer of LLMs, they have an opportunity to win when AI tools crawl the internet.

Taking Perplexity as an example, when you perform a search you'll see that a series of references are also supplied. These references carry a lot of weight in the product recommendations Perplexity makes, and so smaller brands can win, by becoming a trusted source and being referenced directly, or working with publishers that are trusted sources to ensure your brand is represented.