What is a Large Language Model (LLM)?
Last updated 2026-06-19
A large language model (LLM) is an AI system trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language. It powers assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and it is the thing deciding how your brand gets described.
Why this matters for your brand
An LLM does not look up a fixed fact sheet about you. It generates an answer from patterns in its training data and from any sources it retrieves at the moment. That means the story about your brand is reconstructed every time, and it can drift.
What shapes an LLM answer
- Training data: what the model learned about your category
- Retrieval: live sources pulled in to ground the answer
- The prompt: how the user phrased the question
- Citations: the pages the model decides to trust