This article is a summary of my notes from the ‘Becoming the LLM Whisperer‘ session at Digital Marketing World Forum 2026. The presenter was Wesley van der Hoop. Global Head of Search, Unique Vacations Ltd. I’ve used AI to turn my notes into a short summary that’s in line with my writing style.
LLMs now sit squarely in the messiest part of the buyer journey. Not as a novelty — but as an active participant. Google AI Overviews alone have billions of users. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity — the list keeps growing. And together, they’ve quietly moved into the consideration phase.
The messy middle just got a new resident.
What’s changed isn’t awareness or demand. It’s who does the work. Instead of clicking through blogs, videos and forums, buyers increasingly ask an AI to do that on their behalf — and then approve the recommendation it surfaces.
That demands two mindset shifts.
First: bots are now your primary content consumer. LLMs read your blogs, scrape your forums, ingest video transcripts and summaries, and synthesise an answer before a human ever shows up. Your real “audience” is often an intermediary.
Second: if you still judge success by clicks, you’ll overinvest in paid media and underinvest in brand content. Being cited — or simply mentioned — matters more than traffic. You won’t always get the click. You may not even get the link.
And that’s fine.
There are two real ways to win in an LLM‑first world:
- Appear as a cited source in AI answers.
- Be named as the product or brand — even without attribution.
Neither is achieved through hacks. Despite what the GEO snake‑oil merchants claim, SEO isn’t dead, ChatGPT isn’t “the new Google”, schema isn’t a magic lever, and you don’t need an llms.txt file to be visible.
Find a content solution to a content problem, not a technical one.
The foundations look reassuringly familiar:
- Build topical authority with pillar‑and‑cluster models.
- Create content that’s genuinely 10× better, not easy to scale or copy.
- Embed experience, expertise, authority and trust into everything.
- Be radically clear about who your product is for — context shapes LLM answers.
- Put the bottom line up front. LLMs lead with conclusions. So should you.
Then get systematic. Define the prompts you care about. Track visibility. Double down on what works.
Because your customer isn’t comparing ten tabs anymore. They’re approving a decision an AI agent already made.
And if you’re not present in that answer — you weren’t considered at all.
Glyphs & Graphs 