The New Gatekeepers: Is “LLM SEO” the Battleground for Reality?

Written by me together with AI – Working with AI and LLMs daily, I know they aren’t magic. They are systems. And systems can be influenced. I’ve seen in my own projects how they can be manipulated by sound structure, precise language, and of course also by injecting unforeseen context.

This has me thinking about ‘LLM SEO.’ But this is something much bigger than traditional SEO.

In traditional SEO, we fought to be ranked #1.

In LLM SEO, we are fighting to be the source of ‘truth’—the single, authoritative answer the AI provides.

This is a profound shift in power. The person who can influence the LLM isn’t just ‘ranking’; they are effectively curating what society accepts as ‘fact.'”

This brings me back to my thoughts on the ‘Worrying Convergence.‘

When I wrote about authoritarian leaders, I was worried about surveillance. But this is the other side of that coin: a tool for manufacturing ‘alternate facts’ on an industrial scale. What happens when these same powers stop just challenging scientific facts and start feeding their own ‘facts’ to the LLMs we all trust?

This manipulation is a tool of immense power, for both good and bad.

This is where the ‘purpose’ question becomes critical. This power can be used to mislead, but it can also be used for good.

This is a topic that fascinates me. Can this ‘power’ be used to elevate authentic, human experience (E-E-A-T) over shallow, mass-produced content? Can we use ‘LLM SEO’ to help the models find genuine quality?

This is the central question behind my Durable Ledger experiment. It’s my attempt to see if we can use this new power for good and/or commercial purposes (what is good here…?) —to build a system that rewards authenticity.

But the bigger question remains: who will be the gatekeepers?