I have two Ragdoll cats that shed A LOT. I've tried dozens and dozens of different grooming brushes, probably from about four different pet stores and at least two "we sell everything" sites, in the last six months.You can't blame me for getting a little fed up.After reaching new heights of desperation (read: there was cat hair everywhere and two very opinionated felines revelling in their fluff), I asked ChatGPT. I shared the types I'd been using, asked it to find alternatives, to explain the differences and to make strong for-and-against cases for each product it recommended. In minutes, it found a style I hadn't seen, found one in my price range, and sourced one I could get that day.I bypassed Google, all pet store sites, and all of the online, pet-guide resources, and I got a brush my cats tolerate.This isn't a one-off scenario. This is the reality of the new era of search.Customers are no longer passively trawling through a list of links to find answers. They're engaging directly with AI to get a personalised, curated response to their specific problem. And if you're not factoring that into your marketing strategy, your brand may be missing from the conversation entirely.This is why you need to understand what's happening behind the scenes with AI.AI & LLMs 101: The New Engine of SearchSo, what is AI and what's an LLM? In simple terms, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the broad field of creating machines that can think and act like humans. LLMs (Large Language Models), on the other hand, are a specific type of generative AI that have become surprisingly effective in many applications.The secret behind their power is that they aren't just memorising facts; they're building a "mental model" of the world from vast amounts of text data.Think of it like this: they break down your input text into thousands of tiny pieces called "tokens". Then, using their internal model, a prediction engine generates each word in turn. The result is a response that feels incredibly hu...