Unveiling the Resilience of LLM-Enhanced Search Engines against Black-Hat SEO Manipulation

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates the security of LLM-enhanced search engines against black-hat SEO attacks, revealing their vulnerabilities and proposing new attack strategies, thereby informing future resilience improvements.

Contribution

First comprehensive security analysis of LLMSEs against black-hat SEO, including a new benchmark and attack strategies, highlighting vulnerabilities and mitigation insights.

Findings

LLMSEs mitigate over 99.78% of traditional SEO attacks

Retrieval phase intercepts most malicious queries

Off-the-shelf LLMSEs are vulnerable to new LLMSEO attacks

Abstract

The emergence of Large Language Model-enhanced Search Engines (LLMSEs) has revolutionized information retrieval by integrating web-scale search capabilities with AI-powered summarization. While these systems demonstrate improved efficiency over traditional search engines, their security implications against well-established black-hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attacks remain unexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of SEO attacks targeting LLMSEs. Specifically, we examine ten representative LLMSE products (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini) and construct SEO-Bench, a benchmark comprising 1,000 real-world black-hat SEO websites, to evaluate both open- and closed-source LLMSEs. Our measurements show that LLMSEs mitigate over 99.78% of traditional SEO attacks, with the phase of retrieval serving as the primary filter, intercepting the vast majority of malicious queries. We further propose and evaluate seven LLMSEO attack strategies, demonstrating that off-the-shelf LLMSEs are vulnerable to LLMSEO attacks, i.e., rewritten-query stuffing and segmented texts double the manipulation rate compared to the baseline. This work offers the first in-depth security analysis of the LLMSE ecosystem, providing practical insights for building more resilient AI-driven search systems. We have responsibly reported the identified issues to major vendors.