Stop hacking LLMs (Why and How)

SEOs are doing what SEOs do. And Mordy has some feelings about it.

Two tactics have become the go-to playbook for gaming LLMs right now. The first is chunking: stripping your entire site down to bite-sized snippets — nothing longer than two sentences — so AI models can grab and cite them easily. The second is self-serving listicles: publishing “best [category] tools” posts where you rank yourself number one and fill your competitors in below you. Big companies are doing both. Google has explicitly said they know about both and are working to stop them.

And here’s the part people are underplaying: these hacks are working in LLMs — while quietly tanking organic search traffic at the same time. Glenn Gabe, one of the sharpest SEO analysts tracking this, has a name for it. He calls it Mount AI: sites that optimize hard for LLM visibility and watch their Google traffic fall off a cliff. So before you double down on the hack, the question worth asking is: which channel are you actually willing to lose?

Mordy and Miruna don’t say never hack. They say understand what hacking costs you — in positioning, in credibility, and in the organizational mindset it creates. Growth hacking strategies don’t build momentum. They borrow it from the future.

Nick Leroy, founder of Nick Leroy Consulting, SEOjobs.com, and the SEO for Lunch newsletter, joins to answer how Google will most likely get a handle on LLM quality — and why the timeline is shorter than most people assume.