Stop calling it ‘organic’: A plea for honesty in digital marketing

Last week, I read a LinkedIn post that made me bristle.

A SaaS company was celebrating what they called a “growth hack”: creating Reddit threads with product recommendations, positioned within seemingly genuine peer conversations, and successfully manipulating large language models to cite them as top recommendations in their category.

The results were undeniably impressive. Significant increases in LLM visibility, top rankings as a recommended tool across multiple AI platforms, hundreds of thousands of organic Reddit views, and prominent placement in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.

But one phrase in their announcement demands scrutiny. “Then we mentioned [Brand name] organically, inside real conversations.”

Organically.

There’s nothing organic about a coordinated campaign to manufacture social proof at scale. This is advertising masquerading as peer advice, deliberately designed to shape the information that both humans and AI models use to form opinions and make purchasing decisions.

The pollution of trusted spaces

The tactic itself is unremarkable from a technical standpoint. Anyone who understands how LLMs scrape and learn from platforms like Reddit can see why coordinated content might influence their recommendations. The sophistication isn’t what matters here.

What matters is what happens when this playbook becomes widespread.

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According to research from data-mining expert Bing Liu at the University of Illinois Chicago, up to one-third of all consumer reviews on the internet are fake. While this research is now more than a decade old, it remains disturbingly relevant, and the problem has only intensified with the sophistication of modern astroturfing techniques. As this tactic gains visibility among SEO specialists, the percentage of astroturfed Reddit product recommendations will only grow.

We’re witnessing the same trajectory as influencer marketing, where the line between genuine enthusiasm and paid promotion has become so blurred that consumer trust has eroded significantly. Now the SEO industry is actively working to corrupt the spaces where people go specifically to escape marketing speak and access genuine peer recommendations.

AI amplifies old problems

What we’re seeing isn’t entirely new. At its core, LLM manipulation follows the same logic as black-hat SEO. Gaming a system rather than earning authority through genuine value.

The difference is scale and permanence.

Search engines can recover from spam. Google has spent two decades refining algorithms, penalising manipulative tactics, and filtering out low-quality content. The system is designed to self-correct.

But when fabricated content gets embedded in AI training data, the implications are very different. Google’s AI mode is already destroying informational clicks, fundamentally changing how people discover and verify information. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude for product recommendations and receives responses shaped by coordinated astroturfing campaigns, we’re not just manipulating search rankings anymore. We’re corrupting the information infrastructure that millions of people are increasingly relying on for decision-making.

The competitive pressure to compromise

The uncomfortable reality facing ethical SEO specialists is straightforward.

Deceptive tactics demonstrably work, and they’re being celebrated publicly.

When case studies showcasing these methods rack up thousands of Linkedin engagements and conference speaking slots, they send a clear signal about what the industry values. SEO agencies that refuse to employ these tactics face a legitimate question: are they serving their clients’ interests, or are they letting principles interfere with results?

This isn’t hypothetical. As these tactics become more mainstream, every agency will eventually face the client question, “Can you do that for us?”.

The tension is real. Marketing professionals are hired to drive visibility and results. When competitors achieve those results by bending or breaking ethical guidelines, the pressure to follow suit intensifies. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: individual actors are incentivised to defect even when collective cooperation would produce better long-term outcomes.

What regulation won’t solve

Industry regulation isn’t the answer here. The SEO and digital marketing space is too fragmented, too international, and too technically complex for meaningful oversight. Even if regulatory bodies existed, enforcement would be nearly impossible.

More importantly, regulation would likely stifle innovation alongside manipulation. The same tactics that enable astroturfing can also power legitimate community engagement and content distribution. Drawing legal lines would be arbitrary and counterproductive.

But the absence of regulation shouldn’t mean the absence of standards.

What the industry needs is internal reflection. SEO specialists and digital marketers should be asking fundamental questions before deploying tactics:

• Am I creating value or just capturing it?
• Am I helping people make informed decisions, or manufacturing false consensus?
• Would I be comfortable if my methodology were fully transparent?
• What happens to the ecosystem if this tactic scales across the industry?

And these aren’t rhetorical questions. They have practical implications for the long-term sustainability of digital marketing as a profession.

The cost of calling it ‘organic’

But I keep coming back to the LinkedIn post and that word, “organically.”

The fact that they used that word, framing their coordinated campaign as something natural and authentic, suggests there’s an awareness, even subconsciously, that the tactic needs softer language.

And if we’ve reached a point where celebrating manipulation requires euphemistic language, perhaps it’s time to reconsider whether the manipulation itself is defensible.

I say this as someone who works in SEO. I came into this industry because I believe good businesses deserve to be found online. But there’s a difference between persuasion and deception, and watching that line blur while the industry celebrates the results feels like watching something important erode.

Building better infrastructure

The digital marketing industry faces a choice about what kind of information ecosystem it wants to build.

One path leads toward increasingly sophisticated manipulation. An arms race of deception, where every space for genuine conversation is polluted by strategic intervention. This path is economically rational for individuals but collectively destructive.

The alternative requires marketers to think beyond immediate client results and consider long-term consequences. It means drawing lines even when they’re competitively inconvenient. It means choosing value creation over value extraction.

This isn’t naive. It’s understanding that trust, once broken, is difficult and expensive to rebuild. The influencer marketing industry is still dealing with the trust deficit created by undisclosed sponsorships and fake authenticity.

The SEO and digital marketing industry should learn from that cautionary tale rather than repeating it.

The industry we deserve

Australian marketing and media professionals have an opportunity to lead here.

As AI becomes increasingly central to how people find information and make decisions, the tactics we normalise today will shape the information environment for years to come.

The question isn’t whether individuals will occasionally compromise ethics for results. They will. The question is whether the industry as a whole celebrates that compromise or critically examines it.

When we see case studies of manipulating AI training data, we can choose to either applaud the cleverness or question the consequences. When we encounter tactics framed in euphemistic language, we can either adopt the framing or interrogate it.

These choices matter. Not because they’ll eliminate manipulation entirely, but because they determine what kind of professional community we’re building and what standards we’re willing to uphold.

The digital marketing industry will get the information ecosystem it deserves. The only question is whether we’re building one we’ll want to work in five years from now.

Remi Audette is the founder of Sunday Best, a brand-building SEO agency based in Melbourne.