How LLMs Perceive Your Brand: It’s Not What You Think

When marketing teams think about "brand perception," they usually think about surveys, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), or social listener sentiment. But there is a new, arguably more important stakeholder forming an opinion about you: The AI Model.

LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 don't "perceive" brands like humans do. They don't see your logo's beautiful gradient or feel the emotional impact of your TV ad. Instead, they perceive your brand as a mathematical vector in a high-dimensional semantic space.

The Latent Space of Brands

Imagine a vast map where every concept is a point. "Apple" is close to "iPhone," "Design," and "Premium." "McDonald's" is close to "Fast Food," "Burgers," and "Affordable."

LLMs place your brand on this map based on the textual patterns they ingested during training.

• Proximity matters: If your brand appears frequently next to words like "innovative," "reliable," and "secure," the model encodes a strong association between your entity and those attributes.
• Context is king: It's not just about simple co-occurrence. The grammatical and semantic relationship determines the vector. "Brand X is not reliable" places you far away from the "reliability" cluster, even though the words appear together.

The "Black Box" Problem

The challenge for marketers is that this perception is hidden inside the model's weights (the "Black Box"). You can't simply log in to ChatGPT and ask, "Show me my brand vector."

However, you can probe the model to reveal its latent biases. By asking thousands of variations of questions around your category, you can triangulate how the model views you.

• Does it consistently list you as a top competitor?
• Does it mention your key differentiators?
• Does it hallucinate features you don't have?

Why This Matters

This isn't just academic. When a user asks an AI for a recommendation, the model traverses this semantic map to generate a response. If your brand vector is weak, or located in a "bad neighborhood" (associated with complaints, bugs, or irrelevance), you simply won't be mentioned.

You can buy ads on Google. You cannot buy your way into a neural network's weights. The only way to shift your position in latent space is to fundamentally change the corpus of text the internet produces about you—a discipline we call Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or AISO.