The Rise of the Machines: Why LLMs have become our Trusted Buying Companions

Enter The Digital Era: Abundance of Information at the Cost of Time

Search and research have always been there. Even pre-Digital we would rarely purchase anything of value that didn't require some form of information gathering on our part. Even if this constituted a fleeting conversation in store with a shop assistant to fill knowledge gaps or simply to validate a decision, this was all with the objective of pre-informing a purchase to minimise risk.

Then the Digital era arrived. Suddenly we could search for solutions at unprecedented breadth. Choices became abundant, overwhelming sometimes. We could conduct research at unprecedented depth via customer reviews, journalist reviews, comparison sites, discussion forums. Tripadvisor is perhaps the poster child for this era. Previously, with holiday review sites there was always a leap of faith. We were a hostage of fortune to the brochure - beautifully choreographed photography, alluring descriptions of promised experiences. Then the tables turned, the consumer became empowered, and we trawled through Tripadvisor until we found the 1-star review that would rule out a promising destination. And repeat. It was finally possible to mitigate all buying risk, certainly in theory. However this research came at a price: Time!

A direct correlation emerged between the amount of time invested in research versus the payback. In other words the more time spent pouring through websites (articles, blogs, vlogs and discussion forums) the more informed we were, the less risk we assumed.

Enter the AI Era: The LLM Breakthrough and how Generative AI Solved the Time Problem

Then ChatGPT launched in Nov 2022, by November 2023 it had hit the mainstream and by January 2025 it had entered the Top 10 websites in the world, reaching 6th place globally (SimilarWeb, February 2025). And it solved the time vs knowledge trade-off. Swiftly followed by Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and other LLMs (Large Language Models), suddenly time no longer become a factor in search and research.

LLMs have compressed a sometimes arduous research phase (weeks and months in the case of some highly complex, high investment B2B purchases) into minutes and hours, empowering the purchase orchestrator like never before. In B2C, 58% of consumers are now using GenAI instead of traditional search engines to find product and service recommendations - up from just 25% in 2023 (Capgemini Research Institute, January 2025). In B2B, 94% of buyers are already using LLMs during their decision-making process (6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report, November 2025). Adoption has exploded.

The presentation of relevant information in a coherent fashion, coupled with the ability to keep mining that information without losing cohesion, whether via the LLM's next best action prompts or user-led queries, has been truly transformational, both in our domestic and professional lives.

This takes us to trust. LLMs are by and large trusted as research companions because they live in the slipstream of our own desire for independent sources of truth. That's what they facilitate and therefore they inherently earn trust because their purpose is aligned to ours. This should not be confused with LLMs always telling the truth. Hallucinations happen but they are not intentional. LLMs always fall on the side of the consumer and will always want to provide the most helpful, independent advice even if sometimes this isn't possible or there is an algorithmic failure. So at a philosophical and purpose driven level there is already a trust bond between LLM and user.

The Convergence of Personal and Professional Decision-Making

The convergence of home and work life, referenced above, is another LLM phenomenon that has helped forge trust. During and post the Covid epidemic this convergence is something we have come to embrace with the help of technology to facilitate. LLMs have further unified the two with consumers interchanging between family weekend activity decisions and large, complex business investment decisions.

This next level convergence is right there in front of our very eyes - staring at us from the left hand pane in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. LLMs have become trusted life support 24/7 - woven into our daily lives guiding us through risk riddled decision-making minefields with extraordinary ease, accuracy and speed. We entrust family decisions to LLMs, why not business decisions.

Digital Communities and the Generational Shift in Buying

There is a generational dynamic to LLM popularity as well. Gen Z and Millennials now make up 71% of B2B buyers, a figure confirmed by Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey (Forrester, 2023) and corroborated by multiple subsequent studies. These are generations brought up with Digital experiences and communities. They are by default auto-didactic. They are happy to self learn, self teach, self determine.

In effect an LLM is one large Digital community. A hot bed of information, advice and support that buyers can lean on to inform purchase decisions. Contrast this with the common alternative - the biased, sometimes ill-informed persuasive techniques of a sales person and we can see why LLMs have become so popular. Indeed, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience according to Sopro (2025), a figure broadly consistent with Gartner's own 2024 survey of 632 B2B buyers which found 61% prefer a rep-free experience - and this number is only likely to increase (Sopro, July 2025; Gartner, June 2025).

This trend will have a profound impact on the future state of Go to Market which we'll come on to in subsequent articles. But for now it's simply enough to understand how the majority of next generation buyers want to buy, to recognise the inexorable fit of LLMs to this desired purchase flow and to ensure we as business leaders are evaluating GEO as not just a tactical search and visibility tool but as a strategic growth lever as a direct result.

Passing the Inflection Point Between Pull and Push Marketing

There is a final backdrop (and arguably accelerant) to the rise in LLM adoption which is the declining effectiveness of more traditional Marketing "push" tactics. We highlight above that customers increasingly do not want to hear from Sales people. According to these sources, Sales Development Rep outbound calling success rate was 2.3% in 2025 vs 4.8% in 2024 (SalesSo, 2025; Prospeo, 2026). In addition Email reply rates were 3.4% in 2025 vs 6.8% in 2024 (Instantly Benchmark Report, January 2026; Martal Group, July 2025). We have grown weary of excessive selling, mis-selling, ill-informed selling… and as our time has become ever more precious we have increasingly less time for such interactions.

LLMs facilitate an unassisted buying journey based on "pull" marketing principles and will no doubt accelerate the decline of the aforementioned "push" tactics. Indeed I would argue we have now passed the inflection point of pull vs push marketing in the majority of sectors and industries.

Will the Trust Contract Hold? The Risk of LLM Monetisation

Will the perfect marriage of trust and convenience last? Well the latter most certainly will and we shouldn't underestimate the strength of this in isolation as the general pace of life continues to accelerate and in a business context we are asked to increasingly do more with less.

There is an argument that we so desperately want to believe in LLM output because the convenience benefit has been so transformational to our lives that a loss of faith and the subsequent fallout is simply too much to bear. Rowing back now just isn't an option.

Whilst LLMs continue in their ongoing pursuit of truth, striving to provide users with gospel answers based on independent and reliable sources, the trust contract with the user will remain intact. However if these responses become compromised in any way in the form of vendor sponsored answers then inevitably trust will become eroded, despite the seductive powers of convenience.

The LLMs are already finding ways to monetise. Payment tiers have gradually been introduced promising improved features and less throttled usage. At the time of writing this article, ChatGPT have four payment tiers for individual users, Gemini three, Claude three (all excludes company team licenses) from $0 up to $249 a month. OpenAI are trialling ChatGPT advertising in the US currently and if rolled out soon could facilitate a fifth "ad-free" tier. Advertising may serve as a minor irritant but the execution doesn't compromise the user experience or influence prompt answers in any way, then LLM integrity should be preserved.

If payment tiers run out of road and returns on investment are falling short of expectations then the LLM platform owners face some difficult decisions. It is the view of this author that even if sponsored responses are clearly labelled, the LLM that takes this route will face an existential crisis.

We are invested in LLMs because they facilitate what we want to do pre-purchase which is research and validate a decision from reliable and trustworthy sources. What we don't want, as we've already established in this article, is to be sold or marketed too. LLMs risk introducing the very problem they were built to solve.

What if all LLMs follow this route? Well inevitably new LLMs will emerge to take their place that don't. The market is there, the need established and building an LLM is not overly complex with today's technology.

LLMs vs. Traditional Search: Engagement, Emotion and the Future of Brand Websites

There is an argument that traditional search has overcome sponsored answers in the form of Google Ads and the PPC model (pay per click sponsored website links) but then the traditional search experience is highly functional, a means to an end for the user: "Take me to the most relevant website in the fastest possible time".

More often than not we now know our destination and search engines have become a lazy URL entry bypassing tool. The engagement doesn't happen in the search phase, it happens at the destination website. LLMs on the other hand, for the reasons we've already stated, facilitate an immersive experience which garners trust.

There is conjecture that websites may disappear, indeed 93% of sessions in Google's AI Mode end without a click to any external website, the starkest illustration yet of how AI-native interfaces are displacing traditional web traffic (Exposure Ninja, 2026). Purchasing is increasingly possible inside LLMs too, with OpenAI launching its "Instant Checkout" feature in September 2025, initially in partnership with Etsy and with over one million Shopify merchants to follow (OpenAI, September 2025). However the death of websites is unlikely since they remain the best digital representation of brand even with the advent of imagery and video inside LLMs.

At the very worst LLMs users will want to go to websites to validate what the LLMs have told them. But also they will go there to "feel". There is an argument that LLMs are making us less emotional in our buying, training us to be "cold hearted assassins" when it comes to decision making. Whilst that is likely to be true - Kantar research notes that AI-mediated purchasing tends to deprioritise emotional brand cues (Kantar, 2025) - there will always be a percentage of our purchasing that is not wholly rational, that feels good, that feels right, which makes the decision complete in our hearts and minds.

Whilst LLMs are becoming more visual experiences, the control a brand exacts over its own website will always allow for a richer more emotional communication of what that brand actually stands for. So websites will stay but we can't escape the fact that LLM experiences will only become more stimulating, more engaging and more complete with the sole purpose of ensuring the user never has to leave for validation, information or purchase completion. As website owners we need to up our game.

Conclusion: The LLM That Wins the Trust Battle Wins the Long-Term War

In summary, the primary reason why LLMs have become so engrained in our decision making is the powerful marriage of trust and convenience. Will it last? Well time will tell. Hallucinations are already a concern for LLM users so the Tech giants running these platforms would do well to move further in the trust direction to address this issue as opposed to other direction to enhance short-term financials gains via sponsored answers.

There is of course a battle happening between the LLMs and new players will no doubt arise. The bar has been set incredibly high for convenience with minimal scope, now and moving forward, for a competitive advantage. Tied to convenience, the user experiences inside the LLMs will inevitably become more visual and more immersive but again will likely follow a "me-too" pattern where competitive margins remain thin. Ultimately trust will be the defining factor in this arena and the LLMs that repeatedly earn and relentlessly sustain this will secure a place in both our personal and professional lives for a long time to come.