I've made that decision before without LLMs too. If I had been Googling to find possibly relevant material instead of using LLMs to find possibly relevant material, I probably would have bought from Amazon.

With Googling the "figure out what is going wrong" part of solving the problem is more decoupled from the "figure out where to buy this thing" part. The first part involves Googling, looking at a bunch of results, finding a lot are not relevant, trying to refine the search, and repeating probably many times. After that time consuming process when I have finally decided that I needed a new cable I'd probably just go to Amazon without thinking about it.

I always have a little doubt when buying from Amazon because of commingling, but usually not enough to look deeper into it unless the product is something with a high risk of it.

With the LLM instead of Google I upfront described to it a lot of details of my equipment, how I was using it, what symptoms I was seeing, what diagnostic steps I'd taken and the results of those, and why I believe certain things that could cause such problems would not be applicable in my case.

It then finds all the stuff I would have found by Googling, but because it also has way more information from what I told it at the start it can eliminate a whole bunch of the irrelevant results, so I'm starting out way ahead of where I would be after a first Google. A little back and forth and I know what I need to buy.

At that point I'm still at the LLM screen. Since it is right there tossing in a final question about buying from Amazon vs Best Buy is trivial.

I'm not a frequent LLM user. I have yet to pay for any LLM. (I did have a year of free Perplexity Pro that Xfinity gave to its customers a little over a year ago, but when that expired I did not subscribe.

(There's a funny story there--when it expired and they tried to convince me to subscribe, I asked Perplexity if a subscription would be worth it. It told me that considering my usage patterns the free plan was perfectly fine for me and I should stick with that).

A lot of people now are using LLMs instead of or before traditional Google-style searches when they want information. Not just techies or early adopters. The are or are quickly becoming mainstream.

If they are recommending not buying from Amazon that might be something Amazon would want to address.

I might be wrong, but, wouldn't the recommendation to avoid Amazon if you want to be sure come from the massive amount of training data pulled from internet conversations? The kind that would already have been discussing the issue of counterfeit products on Amazon being mixed in with legitimate products from the original manufacturer, since this is a problem that's been going on for, what, at least a decade at this point, right?

The LLM is inherently distrustful of Amazon due to having consumed and trained on a bunch of text that's about how one should be distrustful of Amazon.