Why Companies Can't Adapt to LLMs

It's a funny thing. Everyone talks about adapting to the new reality of the web. Yet, despite the amount of discussion around adapting, not a lot of actual adapting is happening.

Why not? Why are marketing teams having such a hard time dealing with the idea of an LLM-first world? (Hint, it has nothing to do with "traffic.")

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[For the record. My goal here is to help small and medium-sized marketing teams realize what happened over the past 20 years in digital marketing so they can break the cycle. I think we've all followed the leads of some of the big brands, but now it's not serving us well.

Big brands, you can read this too, I just think it's going to be so much harder for y'all to break this cycle.]

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No, Marketing Has Not Actually Changed

I want to address the elephant in the room: marketing hasn't actually changed.

Marketing may have never changed, ever.

One of the fundamental problems that marketing teams face when trying to adapt to an AI-first world is that they believe marketing has changed. (Another challenge is how siloed marketing teams are, which I spoke above previously).

Channels have changed. Consumption trends have changed. Media and mediums have changed. Trends have changed. Tastes have changed. Preferences have changed.

Everything above the surface has changed. Everything else has not.

Marketing has not changed because human nature has not changed.

The introduction of LLMs to the web has not changed how humans respond and what they yearn for. If you don't believe me, you can take Google's CEO's word for it. In an interview with Lex Friedman, Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said:

"...One of our important design goals, though, is when you come to Google Search, you are going to get a lot of context... that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews, and so on... think of the AI as a layer which is giving you context... you're kind of learning what's out there in the world. So those core principles don't change..."

What resonates fundamentally with people has not changed. What we're looking for on an existential level out of life has not suddenly changed because ChatGPT can synthesize what's out there on the web and create a summary of it.

It's an outright absurdity to think otherwise.

What's hard for marketing teams is actually what hasn't changed. People.

Platforms we got. People are a bit harder for us. And what makes it hard is that despite all the changes around us, people are fundamentally the same. Human nature has not changed. Does not change.

At the heart of it all, marketing is communication.

And if the subject (i.e., people) has not fundamentally changed, then in reality, neither has marketing (or perhaps I should say "good marketing).

Seems like a fairly obvious point, but why have marketing teams missed it?

Digital Marketers Have Been Living In an Alternate Reality

Nothing I have said thus far is novel or new. However, if what I am saying is obvious, why is it a contentious point?

The answer is: Marketers have been living in an alternate reality for the past 20 years.

The crux of the issue behind what makes it so hard for teams to adapt to an AI world is:

We've operated as if human nature hasn't existed for over two decades.

Could you imagine if what goes on in digital marketing were to play itself out in reality?

Imagine if you poked the person next to you and kept telling them how you are the all-in-one ultimate solution. And then, when they politely asked you to "stop," you kept doing it anyway. It just would not be tolerated.

The way many marketing teams treat people and the way we behave in the digital space would be intolerable if we did it in real life.

Marketing teams have lived in a performance-first reality that fundamentally did not, does not, and cannot align with genuine human behavior.

It's as if digital marketing teams have been living in a sand castle in the sky. Who in their right mind would think that they could say what they wanted to say to whoever they wanted to say it to, whenever they wanted to say it?

And if you don't think this is how too many teams are looking at it (whether consciously or not), then why is Google's lead Search Advocate saying "...It just sometimes feels like folks focus on building out a topic, ranking pages for the topic, when their business is actually not directly tied to random web traffic for that topic," as recently as June 16, 2025?

It's certainly not a new issue. I've been publicly on this soapbox from a performance marketing perspective since 2020. And I have not been alone. A lot of great marketers from both the performance and brand side of things have been saying the same... for years.

What is amazing about all of this is that otherwise sensible people, incredibly intelligent people, behaved otherwise. For so long.

Marketing teams have been behaving like Wall Street in the 1980s. Without consequence and a grounding in reality. Things that you would normally never think to say or do in real life became everyday activities for digital marketers.

How did this disconnect from the reality of human nature and immature behavior go on for so long?

The consumer let us.

People saw the nonsense, and just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Welp, I guess it's just the internet being the internet. Thank God this isn't actually real."

We got away with overselling and aggressively obtrusive tactics because people treated the web differently. They came to expect this sort of behavior and seemingly tolerate it. Seemingly being the operative word.

Pause. Is that really what you want? To be "sort of almost tolerated" by your consumer or audience?

It's amazing because when you put it in those terms, it seems so absurd. But it's exactly what we did.

Marketing teams didn't care what people actually felt. They didn't care what the consumer actually thought. So long as the traffic and conversion party continued, teams simply kept the trainwreck moving.

Until one day, the consumer became aware.

The same consumer who tolerated the web woke up one day and said, "I don't think the internet should be like this."

And that's where it all started to unravel (not AI, contrary to what most of you reading this might be thinking).

In a nutshell, digital marketing as a practice has, to a large extent, ignored common sense. It's ignored how human beings function, what their deeper internal drives are, and what their needs are. It's ignored that what marketing is at its core is communicating with people.

We've basically ignored how human beings operate, what they truly think, and what they really feel for a quarter of a century.

Why?

Because it worked. Until it didn't.

The Great Awakening

It wasn't one thing or one moment. Like most things in life, it compounded over time, as latent associations tend to (always) do.

People woke up. People started catching on to what the internet was doing. And surprisingly, they didn't like it. Weird.

Think of the web in terms of "stages of maturity." You have childhood, adolescence, and adulthood (and everything in between).

The web consumer has slowly been moving from a state of childhood to becoming a teenager.

I like the analogy of a teenager (having two at home at the moment). They don't 100% have it figured out (and who does, really?), but they are aware and thoughtful in ways they weren't before.

Whereas in the past, the average web consumer wasn't consciously aware of their dissatisfaction with internet content and marketing practices, they are now. And like a teenager, they are not very happy about it.

Suddenly, there is a new level of awareness that didn't exist before.

The truth is, it's not sudden at all.

People have been slowly but surely searching out genuine experiences across the web for a while. Google itself specifically identified this a few years ago.

This was all happening before AI hit the scene.

What happened was that AI produced an inflection point. It forced a hastened maturation process among web users, which resulted in a conscious conversation that didn't entirely exist before.

What I am saying is, the awakening and maturation of the "web user" was hastened along, but not caused by, the introduction of generative AI and LLMs.

Generative AI and the LLM narrative was a "it hit the fan" kind of moment. However, the fundamental underpinnings of the adjustment we're all working through started well before ChatGPT hit the airwaves.

What this means in the context of our discussion (because it means many things) is that a lot of performance-based digital marketing stopped working. A long time ago.

The great awakening of internet audiences everywhere means that the dissonance marketing teams operated with, no longer gets glossed over (to the extent it used to).

Reality and digital are converging. The rules between actual life and digital marketing are starting to merge, and the lines are starting to blur.

The gap between what people are willing to tolerate online and what they are willing to tolerate in reality has narrowed.

This means marketing teams need to start playing by the rules of emotional and existential realities.

One of which is: What happened in the past matters.

Marketing Teams Need to Own Up to Move Forward

This brings us to the central point of why we're here.

Marketing teams can't adjust and move forward with the new reality of the web because in order to move forward, you have to take responsibility and own up to your past. And that is the last thing folks running marketing teams want to do.

And I get it. I am not here to call anyone out. I am not here to criticize (mostly). I am here to make you conscious of what you were not conscious of before.

It all makes sense. It makes sense why a person, let alone a marketing team, would not want to own up to their shortcomings and past behavior.

It's painful.

It's not complicated, it's just painful. (OK, it's also complicated.)

The irony is that this is just human nature. The same human nature that we've been ignoring for years.

There's a lot to own up to. There is a lot to own up to in terms of how we thought about consumers, how we treated audiences, and the amount of dissonance we had. It is, legitimately, a lot to unpack.

It's not about blame. It's about recognizing this reality so it can be dealt with.

I will say, I think the actual blame falls on teams and leadership that were entirely caught up in their own aggression. They became so aggressive and so obsessive that they lost sight of their audience, potential consumers, and even current customers.

Those marketing teams that looked at their audience and even their own customers as cattle to herd - that was wrong. For that, I think there is real blame. The coldness and ruthlessness of it all ( and that was justified as "just being aggressive") was, and still is, plain wrong.

(For the record, after talking with Wil Reynolds, of Seer Interactive, I think my putting the blame on marketing teams and leadership is a bit wrong. I think it's the CEO who put the pressure on these teams and leadership who ultimately needs to take responsibility. Something that has yet to happen in most instances.)

For the rest of us, everyone just kind of got caught up in it all.

Yet, the problem of how to move forward persists regardless.

My Advice For Marketing Teams

Scale it back. Ask yourself:

What would happen if you did what you are doing in your marketing in the context of a one-on-one relationship?

That's my advice. Everything else is just details.

People ask me all the time (not all the time, but it inevitably comes up on podcast interviews)... how did you fix Wix's reputation around SEO?

I admitted Wix was wrong. Everything else was just details.

I couldn't move the brand forward without the brand first taking ownership of what it had done wrong (not on purpose, necessarily, but wrong nonetheless).

I had no way of building credibility among the SEO and digital marketing audience other than owning up to the past. You simply can't move on as a brand unless you own up to your mistakes.

I will tell you it was painful. It was painful for me personally, and it was painful for the brand (and it wasn't like everyone was singing Kumbaya about it, either).

There's no other way.

I think you have to realize that what's going on is much more than "moving your marketing strategy in a different direction." It is that. It is that, plus coming to terms with how you behaved in the past. If it were just the practicality of it all, the amount of wheel spinning would not exist.

Digital marketing teams are suddenly talking about "honing in your brand identity" to build consistency across the web so that LLMs pick up on the right signal and message.

Embedded within that statement is that brands have at a minimum ignored themselves and who they are. That in and of itself is something significant to come to terms with.

There is a flip side to that.

When we ignore who we are as brands (with any sort of actual depth), we also ignore (if not worse) our audience and customers. Your audience and your customers are asking something of "you," and if you can't return something of yourself, that relationship is damaged from the get-go.

In practical terms, your brand (at a minimum) becomes a utility that demands no loyalty or commitment to it. And why should it? You can't even commit to yourself. Why should anyone commit to you?

If you are a marketing team, it is not enough to reevaluate your strategy; you have to reevaluate yourselves as a company. Part of that is coming to terms with your own shortcomings (much as it is in reality beyond "marketing" and "companies).

My advice is to start having honest conversations about how you genuinely see your audience and consumers.

Do you really feel a certain amount of responsibility towards them beyond what's good for business? If so, does that jive with how aggressive your outlook and strategy actually are? (I'm not saying you can't be aggressive for the record.)

The best way to gauge if you have a schism between how you think you're relating to your audience and how you actually relate to them is to evaluate:

If you had the same outlook and strategy, would it fly in your one-on-one relationships?

If the answer is no, then it doesn't work with your audience or consumers either.

To our point here: Would pretending that you didn't say what you said yesterday fly in your personal relationships?

Then it doesn't fly with your audience or consumers either.

Brands don't want to admit mistakes. They feel it shows weakness. They feel it is unbecoming of their "status" and whatever. It's the same hubris that led us to engage in performance tactics that fundamentally treated our audiences as if they were idiots.

You can't call someone an idiot on the street one day and be their best friend the next day.

You can't do it on the internet either.

In both instances, you'd probably have to suck it up, apologize, and start over again.

Which pretty much sums up the human condition in one sentence.