A customer asked me this recently: do they even need a community any more? Their users are increasingly getting answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest instead of searching a forum.
My answer was yes. You need it more than ever.
Every one of those LLMs learned what it knows from somewhere. A huge part of that somewhere is community content: forum threads, support discussions, wikis, Q&A boards. If communities stopped existing, the pool of knowledge those models draw on would stop growing too. No new content, no new answers.
Think about what happens when you release a new product, or a new version of an existing one. There are always issues nobody has seen before; edge cases, odd interactions, the "why does this happen when I do X" questions. None of that exists anywhere yet; not in a knowledge base, not in a support article, and certainly not in an LLM's training data. Somebody has to ask it first, and somebody has to answer it, in a place that's indexed and citable. That place is your community.
LLMs aren't replacing communities; they're consuming them. Increasingly, when a model answers a question, it's using search tools to pull from exactly the kind of content your community generates, then presenting it back faster and more conveniently than a user could find it themselves. The community is still doing the work. It's just doing it for a different audience now, one that includes both humans and machines.
So the role of a community is shifting. Fewer people may browse it directly. More of its value comes from being a living, structured, well maintained source that both people and LLMs can draw from. That changes what "good" looks like: structure, searchability and freshness matter more than ever, because you're now serving two audiences instead of one.
What doesn't change is the underlying need. Someone still has to ask the new question first. Someone still has to own the answer. If that stops happening anywhere, every LLM answering questions about your product eventually runs dry.
If you're rethinking whether your community still earns its place, that's the wrong question. The right one is whether it's built for how it's actually being used now, by people and by the AI tools increasingly standing in front of them.
How 4 Roads builds online communities.
First published on LinkedIn on 26 August 2026.
