It’s Time for New Discourse Around Search
If everything is search, then search is everything, and those who control it decide what the world sees and feels.
Does the world really need another SEO blog? I’m usually the first to say no. But a few things have happened recently that have changed my mind.
Late last year, a law firm representing investors in a failed startup I advised in 2020 got in touch. They had used custom Claude to run a postmortem on the business, assessing what contributed to its failure. That alone tells you something has shifted. AI is no longer just being used to make decisions. It is being used to audit them, even years after the fact.
The review pulled up meeting notes from over five years ago in which I challenged the lead developer during a consulting call. A difficult figure, now reportedly in hiding somewhere between Turkey and Azerbaijan, but very talented. The issue was simple. They were building a platform about improving the discoverability of technology, ironically by using custom JavaScript that wasn’t indexable by Google. No indexation meant no controlled visibility, and I refused to sign off on their investor deck because the digital roadmap wasn’t sound. So they found someone else who would.
The fixes were obvious at the time (server-side rendering, pre-rendering, dynamic rendering), but they were refused. The developer was adamant that they didn’t need Google. Failure followed. Indexation was negligible, organic search traffic never rose above single digits, and the platform relied almost entirely on costly social media and industry events to generate attention. A company built on discoverability never made itself discoverable.
There were other issues across the business, but this was structural. The gap between what was sold to investors (to the tune of around £20m) and what was actually built is where the problem sits. That gap is no longer a mystery box. Investors and VCs now understand search well enough to interrogate it properly, and that changes the balance of power.
Something else has changed. At the start of this year, my agency Searchlight London took on its first SEO client without a website, and we now have two. The work has nothing to do with pages or code. It is about monitoring and shaping how these clients appear across Google and AI systems, including suppliers, distributors and press. When something looks off, we fix it. This is brand management, just through the search layer.
What has changed most, though, is the weaponisation of search.
In the Middle East, coverage of conflict is not just reported but deployed. Content is produced at scale, distributed across aligned networks, reinforced by social signals, and picked up by Google at speed until it becomes self-reinforcing. Western systems are not set up to compete with that level of coordination. They publish; others operate. The result is a version of reality that ranks first. The inconsistencies are visible, but the outputs still claim authority. It has the feel of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
In Europe and North America, far-right groups are not simply posting content but engineering visibility. Threads are seeded on forums, picked up by low-authority sites, linked across networks and pushed into search for specific queries until they cross the threshold where systems like ChatGPT and Claude ingest and summarise them. At that point, the origin disappears but the narrative remains.
Financial markets follow the same pattern. Around assets like Bitcoin during volatility, content moves in waves. Positive narratives cluster, negative ones follow, headlines shift tone within hours, and those signals are indexed, aggregated and fed into AI summaries that shape retail behaviour in real time.
The LLMs compress all of this further. They take whatever is already winning across the web and present it as a single answer. The contest is no longer about ranking ten blue links, but about controlling what gets distilled into the version of truth people are given.
I have a workshop and a mantra, ‘Everything Is Search’. I usually apply it to clients, revenue and exit strategies, but it extends far beyond that. Politics is search, war is search, health is search. Once you see it, it becomes difficult to unsee.
In February, at a Tony Blair Institute for Global Change event in London, I asked what happens when search systems default to US healthcare insights, where once-fringe ideas like vaccines and Paracetamol causing autism are now being pushed as policy. For patients in the UK and Japan, this is not theoretical. It will result in real harm. The response was direct. Regulation is coming, and search LLMs will be expected to follow local laws and standards. It was a remarkable moment, and a reminder that the influence of search now extends far beyond the industries that built it.
We now live in a world where search engines are not just tools for finding information. They shape it, filter it and increasingly decide what is seen at all. Businesses are no longer just competing on product or brand, but on how they are represented across systems they do not control. Governments are waking up to the fact that policy and public opinion are being mediated through search layers built elsewhere. Individuals are making decisions based on outputs that feel neutral but are anything but.
That shift demands a different level of discourse around search. Not marketing chatter, but a more serious conversation about power, incentives and control. The systems themselves have moved on. Most of the conversation around them has not.
I’m putting myself into that conversation deliberately. I’ve spent decades working in search where visibility ties directly to revenue, valuation and outcomes, and I operate across business and political environments where influence and narrative actually matter. I’m educated, but more importantly I’ve applied it where it counts. That’s what earns you a seat at the table.
This newsletter, SERPENTS, is about that layer. The systems and incentives that control what surfaces, and what stays hidden.
And so perhaps the world doesn’t need another SEO blog. Good. This isn’t one.
Dillan Gandhi works at the intersection of search engines, business models, brand discovery, cultural relevance and user experience. He is the Principal Consultant at Searchlight London and Dillan Gandhi Consulting. Connect with him here.