The purchase journey among Asian consumers is far less predictable, and far more complicated, than it used to be. Brand preference is no longer set before the journey begins; it’s formed during it. The variety of channels and touchpoints that marketers can work with has become far greater. And now, another one has entered the game: large language models (LLMs). By synthesizing information, comparing alternatives, and offering direct recommendations, LLMs are adding another influential layer to an already challenging discovery ecosystem.
With nearly half of Asian consumers undecided at the outset, and the channels with the highest reach all digital, brands have a genuine opportunity to shape influence early, rather than competing for it later. In this environment, taking control of the brand narrative is more important than ever.
To help marketers do just that, we have analyzed the results of our recent Global Consumer Survey to better understand how these dynamics are playing out across four key Asian markets—China, India, Japan, and South Korea—where consumer behavior, digital ecosystems, and levels of platform adoption vary widely.
The analysis can be divided into two stages of the purchase funnel: reach (or which touchpoints are gaining the most attention among consumers) and influence (or which touchpoints have the greatest impact on what consumers ultimately decide to buy).
This article provides insights into how the purchase journey in Asia is changing, how the relationship between reach and influence is evolving across touchpoints, and what it means for where brands should invest their marketing resources.
From Discovery to Choice
To understand how touchpoints shape a purchase, we tracked the same set of channels across two measures of consumers’ most recent purchase journey (see sidebar, “About our Research”):
About our Research
- Reach: The share of purchase journeys in which consumers interacted with a touchpoint to inform their decision-making. This metric indicates the number of consumers the touchpoint reached during the purchase journey.
- Influence: The share of those consumers interacting with each touchpoint who said that the touchpoint stood out in shaping the brand they ultimately purchased or selected. This metric quantifies how strongly each touchpoint, once reached, influenced the consumers’ choice of brand.
These metrics give us a simple lens for the report: reach shows how widely a touchpoint is used in discovering the brand options when researching purchases, while influence shows how much the touchpoint matters once used. Taken together, these two metrics help distinguish how often a channel appears in the purchase journey, from how much it shapes brand choice to when it does.
Both of these numbers matter, of course, but it is the interaction among them that reveals what marketers can learn about where best to invest their marketing dollars.
Reaching Out
Of all the touchpoints that Asian consumers have access to—everything from print media and billboards to online advertising and branded websites—social media stands out. In fact, social media has greater reach in Asia than it does globally: consumers interact with social media in 21% of purchase journeys across Asia, compared with an average of 14% elsewhere around the world.
Overall, reach varies greatly by country market. In China and India, social media leads the way, reaching consumers in 31% of purchase journeys in China and 29% in India. In contrast, consumers in both Japan and South Korea are most likely to be reached through internet research; social media ranks third in Japan, at just 12%, and is tied for third with brand or retailer website in South Korea, at 14%. (See Exhibit 1.)
In China, social media has evolved well beyond discovery to become part of the commerce infrastructure itself. There, online platforms can now integrate livestream shopping, influencer-curated product lists, and in-app shoppable links, allowing consumers to move from inspiration to purchase without leaving the platform.
India is moving in the same direction, supported by the rapid growth of the creator economy and deeper links between leading social platforms and e-commerce giants. Large video sharing platforms and marketplaces in India are enabling creators to connect product discovery more directly with purchase. Such features are bringing content, influence, and conversion closer together.
Meanwhile, despite the dominance of social media and other more traditional touchpoints, LLM search is quickly emerging as a meaningful touchpoint in Asia. With 12% reach across Asian purchase journeys, it already ranks among the region’s top five touchpoints by reach, ahead of TV and radio, print, and billboards.
However, its reach is not yet uniform across markets, and the gap is wider for LLM search than for almost any other touchpoint: in India, it already reaches 22% of purchase journeys, for example, while in Japan it reaches just 5%, more than a fourfold difference.
At first glance, LLM search may not look like a major discovery channel yet as compared with established touchpoints such as social media and internet research. But reach alone does not reveal the full extent of its influence. Reach tells us only where consumers are starting. What matters next is whether those touchpoints actually determine which brands they choose.
Gaining Influence
Clearly, the touchpoints consumers encounter most are not always the ones that have the greatest influence on their brand decisions. Reach tells us how often a touchpoint shows up as consumers seek brand advice. Influence tells us how much it matters once consumers use that touchpoint. Across Asia, those two measures are starting to pull apart, and LLM search is the clearest example (see Exhibit 2).
While LLM search appears in just 12% of purchase journeys across Asia, fully 64% of the consumers who use it say that it shapes their brand choices. That ties it for the second-highest influence across Asia, just behind social media, despite not ranking among the top three channels by reach.
Reach varies far more by market than influence does. LLM search’s reach swings from 6% in Japan to 23% in India, a difference of more than four times, while its influence among the consumers who use it stays in a tighter band, roughly 52% to 68% across the four markets, India included. The pattern holds across most touchpoints: which channels consumers use differs sharply by market, but how much a channel matters once it’s used differs far less. (See Exhibit 3.)
The lesson for brands: Optimizing purely for reach risks under-investing in a channel that’s already punching above its weight. Don’t wait for reach to scale before investing in a channel such as LLM search; once adoption grows, its influence is likely to hold at similarly strong levels, just as it already does elsewhere in the region. Instead, look beyond reach when deciding where marketing dollars can have the greatest effect.
LLM Search on the Rise
The reasons for the rapidly rising influence of LLM search are twofold. First is its ability to open up the range of possibilities for consumers to consider on their purchase journey. So far, marketers have assumed that LLM search will concentrate influence around a handful of large incumbents. But as our recent report on consumer behavior shows, the opposite is happening. In more than half of LLM-assisted purchase journeys, consumers end up considering brands they would not otherwise have found on their own.
As a result, LLM search is giving a wider set of brands an opportunity to influence choice, including brands with lower reach through traditional touchpoints. The lesson is clear—not just for new and smaller brands, but for all: Winning the purchase journey no longer depends solely on investing across different reach touchpoints before the consumer turns to LLM. LLM search itself can become another route into the consumer’s shortlist of brands to consider.
The second reason is trust. LLM search has quickly become one of consumers’ trusted sources by cutting through an increasingly complex, cluttered marketplace crowded with options. And it can provide personalized, direct, and transparent recommendations that feel more relevant to their particular needs.
As trust in LLM recommendations deepens, the shift from LLM search as a shaper of the shortlist of brand options to one that initiates the transaction itself through so-called agentic commerce is no longer a distant scenario. CMOs in Asia-Pacific are leading the way, with 28% of them ranking agentic commerce among their top three priorities, ahead of CMOs in North America (23%) and Europe (13%).
For brands, the question is no longer just a matter of which touchpoints shape consideration, but whether they are ready for a world where LLM can also complete the purchase.
Implications for Marketers
Winning the battle for consumer attention in the age of AI requires four critical moves, each of which builds on the same foundational element of all marketing: strong, well-organized brand content.
Lead with Reach and Influence
Question for leadership: Is your investment aligned with where consumers spend their time, or where they actually make up their mind?
- Balance reach with influence when making investment decisions. Reach establishes visibility and consideration, while influence determines how strongly a touchpoint shapes the eventual decision. Evaluate both rather than over-index on either one.
- Integrate the strategic focus across the entire set of intended touchpoints rather than manage each one on its own. Social media, internet research, LLM search, brand websites, and LLM agents feed on each other, so neglecting one can create a weakness in others.
- Review the LLM data regularly by category and market, since the gap between reach and influence will keep shifting as LLM search adoption grows.
Win in LLM Search and Other LLM Answer Modes
Question for leadership: If LLM search were already one of your largest sales channels, would you know how your brand is performing in it?
- Diagnose your LLM results. Reverse-engineer LLM search and generative engine optimization (GEO) answers for your brand category’s key queries to see which sources get cited—both yours and competitors’—and flag answers where your brand receives no mentions.
- Rewrite and restructure content optimized for LLM search, not just for people. Answer questions the way people actually phrase them, and mark up your brand content with schema, clear subheadings, and comparison tables so it is something LLM can use, not just something a consumer can scroll through.
- Manage your brand everywhere LLM search looks, not just your own site. LLM search draws heavily on sources beyond brand-owned websites, including forums, review sites, social content, and Wikipedia, making a brand’s broader digital presence increasingly important for discoverability. Manage brand websites for LLM search and keep brand information consistently searchable across all potential sources through GEO.
- Monitor LLM search results like a test-and-learn program. Track how often LLM search cites your brand, what the LLM’s sentiment is on attributes relevant to your product or service, and whether citations go stale.
Build for Agentic Commerce
Question for leadership: If AI commerce agents could complete a consumer’s purchase today, would your brand be in the running, and would you want your own agent to be the one closing it?
- Map how customers interact with AI commerce agents. Understand by industry category, customer segment, and decision type what customers hand off entirely, what they still decide on for themselves, and where the two could work together.
- Build the journey for human attention and machine evaluation in parallel, not as separate projects.
- Structure product, pricing, and availability data so outside commerce agents can discover, price, and complete a purchase directly. Track emerging agentic AI checkout standards (such as ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout or Amazon’s “Buy for Me”) rather than build around just one standard, since they’re still evolving.
- Measure outcomes with agents, not just with people, by tracking share of mentions, citations, and recommendation rates. Begin now by measuring key metrics, then build toward structured data and checkout integration as those capabilities mature.
Establish the Foundations for LLM Search and Agentic Commerce
Question for leadership: Is your measurement and data infrastructure built for how consumers shop today, or how they shopped five years ago?
- Make your brand content and data machine readable by LLMs now, and identify which systems will need to connect to outside LLM platforms as the platforms evolve.
- Rework the operating model, moving ownership out of a single SEO or marketing team, and instead arrange for sharing accountability across marketing, product, and technology, with a named owner and clear decision rights.
- Develop the capabilities needed to build and track new KPIs for monitoring share of LLM search mentions and AI citations and develop the skills needed to create new tracking tools as the AI discoverability landscape changes.
- Treat all of the above as one connected system, not three separate workstreams, since a gap in any single one will undercut the other two.
Conclusion
As the results of our survey show, the touchpoints that consumers use to begin their purchasing journey and their degree of influence are evolving rapidly. Social media, brand websites, LLM search, and LLM agents are becoming a single connected system, not separate channels. In this environment, treating them as isolated levers is a recipe for missed influence.
Winning now means three things at once: redirecting investment to where influence actually sits, building the specific muscles GEO and agentic commerce require, and putting in place the data, ownership, and measurement that make those muscles usable at scale.
Brands that treat reach and influence as one AI-mediated journey, and organize around it now, will set the terms for others to follow.
