Reverse Engineering ChatGPT and Perplexity “SEO”
A primary lesson about how LLM Search works is that its not a research tool. The important thing to know is just how basic LLM search really is. For the most part, all they do is scrape Google/Bing for what you asked.
Here’s an example:
If you ask an LLM “Who are the top writers” on Reddit – they dont look at Reddit users Karma, or upvotes or “assess their writing:” (and neither does Google).
What they do is search for “Top writers on Reddit” – and then reproduce an “overview” or summary of that document.
To be fair, neither does Google. And like Google – its not done in real time. Google makes index lists and updates your rank position in that index which “speeds up” searching. in the same way, LLMs scrape content from previous search results – typically saving the top 20 results each time!
