Try searching for a simple vitamin on Amazon.

You’ll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of nearly identical products. Prices range wildly. Some have 30,000 reviews (are those mostly fake?), others have 300 (is it unreliable?). The photos look polished, but is that just AI or a great designer? Basically that commodity idea is just a sea of unfiltered (or sponsored) choice.

When the stakes are low, maybe you take a risk. But when you’re putting something into your body, or booking a $2500 hotel stay, you want to trust. Not data. Not AI summaries. Trust.

And trust, today, is still built through brands.

There’s an assumption that AI will solve this by aggregating and summarizing information better than humans. I’m not convinced. If platforms like Google, Amazon, Booking, or Tripadvisor haven’t solved fake reviews at scale, it’s unlikely a generic LLM will magically figure it out. In fact AI systems, trained on aggregated opinions, could be even easier to manipulate. Flood the system with enough “good” signals, and the AI will confidently recommend the wrong product.

Currently LLMs optimize for what is most said (it becomes the most probable suggestion), not necessarily what is most true.

So where does that leave us?

Back with brands.

Take Apple. When they release the Macbook Neo, people don’t see it as “cheap.” They see it as “accessible premium.” The same product from an unknown manufacturer, even with identical specs (OK the they wont have MacOS), they would struggle to get attention. Not because of the product, but because of the lack of trust.

And a hotel stay frequently costs a lot more than a Macbook.

As AI compresses discovery into fewer options, the choice will be more opaque. Fewer touchpoints. Less differentiation. More reliance on invisible ranking systems. In that world, brands become shortcuts for decision-making. And if we look back at internet history, that is exactly how Google search evolved too. After letting everything roll up to the top of search pages, after a while authority became a key point. And isn’t authority another concept for a brand?

Ironically, the more the internet promises to democratize everything, the more we need brands to navigate it.

As I wrote in my First principles of marketing article. The moment you have more than one of something, you need marketing. And if you do marketing consistently enough, you end up with a brand.

I don’t think AI will be the exception, I think it will probably reinforce it.

By Martin Soler