Funnel

The world is pretty obsessed with reinventing itself around LLMs right now. Part of that reinvention is figuring out where LLMs get their information from, and what they’re willing to cite.

There are trade publications that write about this, there are industry voices who research it, and there are software companies that plot trends around it.

Now, there are even academic papers on how well those citations and recommendations convert.

I find this last piece interesting, because it suggests that LLM’s perform poorly when viewed through the lens of last-click attribution.

But you know what else performs poorly when viewed through such a lens? Meta advertising.

Discussions around LLMs, it seems, have jumped very far ahead in terms of compressing the funnel. ChatGPT’s announcement with Shopify, Etsy and Walmart are all exciting, but, right now, it looks like ChatGPT is primarily a discovery channel.

And the way discovery works is pretty universal: People talk about things they like. The more they talk about them (and the more people who talk about the same things), the more other people hear about them. Then, the businesses that sell those things grow.

This is user-generated content at its core. Reviews are the simplest distillation of that. And we traditionally have thought about them as a bottom-of-funnel mechanism that helps convert.

But what if we’ve had that wrong? What if reviews are only a bottom-of-funnel mechanism that helps convert, because that’s where we’ve primarily used them?

At Stamped, we know plenty of marketers who read through reviews and find the best ones to use in advertising, email, etc. They’re effectively bringing reviews up the funnel, sometimes even to the point of discovery.

And if we end up in a world where LLMs enable the same amount of discovery as Facebook and Instagram, it’s going to happen, in part, because there’s an incredible amount of people who talk about the things they like. And that will make reviews more important than they ever were—because their impact will be seen throughout the entire funnel.