THE LEGEND · LEVELS 1 AND 2 FIELD GUIDE

Search is dead, AI ate our organic traffic for breakfast, and if I had to sit through one more algorithm panic meeting, my brain was going to 404.
So instead of touching grass and upon my kids' request, I locked myself (yeah!, right) in a room with Claude, JS, hooked it up to headless platform Crystallize (some parts for added complexity), and built this game out of pure, unadulterated cope.
Welcome to the survival guide—read it once or keep getting clapped by pop-ups and crawl budget leaks like an amateur.
p.s. Both this page and the game are filled with easter eggs meant to...well...learn some SEO along the way.

PLAY LEVEL 1 LEVEL 2 LEVEL 3 LEVEL 4

CHAPTER 1The story so far

THE YEAR IS 2026.

Search engines stopped sending people anywhere. They read your pages, summarise them in a box and keep the click. The Page 1 Safe Zone shrinks by the millisecond, and behind it waits the No-Click Void, where traffic goes to die.

You're an indie SEO specialist: glasses, band tee, one browser tab of hope. Somewhere past the broken web sits the Golden Knowledge Graph, the last place where being the source still counts.

Four zones (levels) stand in the way. Get your canonical URLs through all of them, and make the machines cite you and search engines rank you.

LEVEL 1: THE LEGACY SERP SUBURBS

First stop is what's left of the old results page. Ten blue links, abandoned guestbooks and pop-ups that never learned to close. The locals still think it's 2009 or 2015 or even 2020. Stomp the banners, dodge the redirects, and don't stand on a 404 longer than you have to.

LEVEL 2: THE LLM WASTELAND

Past the suburbs, the web turns synthetic. Answer boxes lie half buried in the sand, and citation tombstones mark sources nobody checked. Four models patrol the sky: GPTerry, Mode-9000-Search, Opus C and Kimi-K-Two. They don't want to link to you but they wanna crawl and use you. They want to be you. Keep your bylines standing and make them cite you properly.

The SEO specialist

Ordinary bloke. Glasses. Strong opinions about canonical tags. That's you.

The Golden Knowledge Graph

The finish line at the end of the level. Touch it to get indexed and finish the run.

REAL SEO Google's Knowledge Graph stores facts about people, places and things. Knowledge panels are where those facts show up in results. Google: About knowledge panels ↗

Level 1: The Legacy SERP Suburbs

Blue links, 2009-era results and broken pagination. Low stakes, lots of pop-ups.

Level 2: The LLM Wasteland

Neon desert, server towers and four AI models in formation. Shoot them down before they cite past you. Earns a medal, not points.

CHAPTER 2Controls

Keyboard on desktop. On phones and tablets, on-screen buttons appear automatically. Turn your phone sideways for the best view.

Keyboard

< >
Run left and right
^
Internal Link Leap. Hold for a higher jump, press again in the air to double jump
v
Crouch. Ducks under markdown tokens
Z
Schema Slap (weapon), a short-range JSON-LD whip

REAL SEO Structured data in JSON-LD tells search engines what a page is about, and can unlock rich results. Crystallize: Structured data ↗

X
Disavow (weapon). Throws a broken backlink, up to 2 on screen at once
>>
Server-Side Prerender dash. Double-tap a direction
P ESC
Pause, or enter a code
M
Sound on or off

Moves worth knowing

Stomp
Land on an enemy's head to fact-check it, and bounce. Most go down in one stomp; the Hallucinating Bot takes three. Hold ^ as you land to bounce higher.
Dash
For a split second you can't be hurt. It damages anything you run into and smashes Bloated JS Walls. Short cooldown.
Slap
Also swats markdown tokens out of the air.
Touch
Left cluster moves and crouches. Right cluster has Slap, Throw and Jump. Double-tap an arrow to dash.

Level 2: The LLM Wasteland

< >
Strafe along the bottom of the screen
Z
Schema Slap (weapon). Rapid-fire braces. Hold it down to keep firing, up to 3 on screen
X
Disavow (weapon). A slow shot that pierces a whole column of bots, short cooldown
Touch
Left and right on one side, Z and X on the other.

CHAPTER 3Reading the screen

1Indexed Pages are your lives. You start with 3 and can hold 5. In real search, a page is indexed once Google has stored it and can show it in results.
2Crawl Budget is your health. It turns red when low. Hit zero and you lose a page. In real search it's how much Google is willing to crawl, and it mostly matters for very large sites.
3Score. It breaks ties on the scoreboard.
4Progress through the level. This is what the scoreboard ranks first.
5Run time. Finish under 5 minutes for a time bonus.
6The active power-up and how long it has left.

CHAPTER 4Enemies

In Level 1, touching an enemy costs a quarter of your Crawl Budget, and every enemy can be stomped. Level 2 enemies are marked in pink. They fly in formation and you shoot them from below.

Pop-up Banner

Patrols the ground and turns back at ledges. Slow, loud and everywhere.

Beat it: stomp, slap, disavow or dash.

1 HIT10 PTS

REAL SEO Google's page experience guidance asks whether your pages avoid intrusive interstitials, the pop-ups that cover the content people came for. Google: Page experience ↗

Broken Redirect

A 301 loop that bounces toward you in high arcs. Hard to jump over cleanly.

Beat it: disavow it mid-bounce, or time a stomp on the way down.

1 HIT50 PTS

REAL SEO A 301 tells search engines a page has moved for good. Chains and loops waste crawling and can hide the new page. Google: Redirects and Search ↗

Hallucinating Bot

Hovers in mid-air and fires confidently wrong markdown tokens straight at you every couple of seconds.

Beat it: it takes three hits. Stomp it, and each bounce sets you up for the next one, or disavow it from below.

3 HITS100 PTS

REAL SEO AI Overviews and AI Mode now answer above the results. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in them; regular SEO is how you get in. Google: AI features and your website ↗

Markdown token

The bot's ammo. It flies in a straight line toward where you were standing.

Beat it: crouch under it, slap it or shoot it down.

-25 BUDGET20 PTS IF DESTROYED

Toxic Backlink

A fast scraper that scuttles along the ground. The toughest walker in the suburbs.

Beat it: two disavows or slaps, or a single stomp or dash.

2 HITS70 PTS

REAL SEO The game exaggerates. Google says most sites never need to disavow links, because it can usually tell which ones to ignore. Google: Disavow links ↗

GPTerry

The most common model. Fires hallucinated citations constantly, and is always confident about it.

Beat it: one Schema Slap.

LEVEL 2 ENEMY1 HITWAVE 1+

REAL SEO AI assistants are starting to act for people, not just answer them. Clear, structured content is what they can read, trust and use. Crystallize: Agentic commerce ↗

Mode-9000-Search

Wide, calm, one red eye. Drops answer boxes. Any box that reaches the ground goes zero-click and drains a little of your Crawl Budget.

Beat it: two hits, and shoot the boxes as they fall.

LEVEL 2 ENEMY2 HITSWAVE 2+

REAL SEO Google's AI Mode builds answers from pages in its index, so the usual rules apply: crawlable, indexable, genuinely useful content. Google: AI features and your website ↗

Opus C

Slow, polite, wears a bow tie and apologises every time you hit it. Rarely fires, but its considered beams are long and hit hard.

Beat it: three hits. A Disavow helps.

LEVEL 2 ENEMY3 HITSWAVE 3+

REAL SEO Anthropic runs separate bots for training, search and live user requests, and you can allow or block each one in robots.txt. Anthropic: How Claude crawls the web ↗

Kimi-K-Two

Fast and cheap. Breaks formation to dive straight at you. Hit it and it forks into two smaller copies.

Beat it: hit it early, then clean up both forks before they slip past.

LEVEL 2 ENEMY1 HIT + FORKSWAVE 4

REAL SEO Kimi K2 is an open-weight model: anyone can download, run and fork it. That's the joke behind the split. Moonshot AI: Kimi K2 on GitHub ↗

Level 2 ammo

Hallucinated citations fall straight down, answer boxes drift, and Opus C's beams can't be shot down.

Beat it: shoot citations and boxes out of the air, and hide behind your bylines.

LEVEL 2 ENEMY-25 BUDGET

CHAPTER 5Hazards

These can't be killed. Falling into any pit costs a whole Indexed Page, whatever power-up you have.

Zero-Click Chasm

A wide pit under a floating AI Overview widget that sucks you downward while you're in the air above it. There's one blue link to land on in the middle.

Survive it: jump late, double jump early, and use the middle platform.

LOSE A PAGE

REAL SEO SparkToro data reported by Search Engine Land shows 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from about 60% in 2024. Search Engine Land: Zero-click study ↗

Crawl Budget Leak

A 404 drain set into the ground. Standing on it bleeds about a quarter of your budget every second. It usually has Clicks hanging over it as bait.

Survive it: keep moving, or jump the whole thing.

DRAINS BUDGET

REAL SEO A real 404 for a page that's gone is fine. The trap is a soft 404: an error page that still returns 200, which wastes crawling. Google: HTTP status codes ↗

Bloated JS Wall

A floor-to-sky barrier of client-side render lag. Too tall to jump.

Get through: double-tap toward it to dash straight through.

DASH ONLY200 PTS

REAL SEO Google can render JavaScript, but content that only appears after heavy client-side code can be delayed or missed. Server-side rendering avoids that. Google: JavaScript SEO basics ↗

Algorithm Core Update

Level 1's version is a Metadata Scramble. For about six seconds the screen glitches, your status bar turns to gibberish, and blue link platforms flicker in and out.

Survive it: only jump onto a platform while it's solid.

PLATFORMS VANISH

REAL SEO Core updates are broad changes to Google's ranking systems, rolled out several times a year. Google's advice is to improve content, not chase quick fixes. Google: Core updates ↗

Helpful Content Shredder

The finale. Past the last checkpoint the screen starts scrolling by itself and the Unhelpful Content Penalty rolls in behind you. Fall behind and it eats an Indexed Page, shield or not.

Survive it: don't stop, and save your double jump for the pits.

LOSE A PAGE

REAL SEO Google folded its helpful content system into core ranking in 2024. Its self-assessment questions are still the best checklist there is. Google: Creating helpful content ↗

CHAPTER 6Power-ups and pickups

Power-ups come out of Feeling Lucky blocks. Hit one from below and it drops its prize on top of the block. You can only run one power-up at a time, so a new one replaces the old.

DR 90+ Backlink Shield

Enemies and tokens can't touch your budget, and anything you run into gets destroyed. Pits and the Shredder still count.

15 SECONDS50 PTS

REAL SEO Domain Rating is an Ahrefs score for a site's backlink profile, not something Google uses. Buying links to pump it breaks Google's link rules. Ahrefs: Domain Rating ↗ and Google: Link spam policies ↗

Green Core Web Vitals

You run about 40% faster and jump higher, which is perfect for the chasm and the Shredder.

10 SECONDS50 PTS

REAL SEO Core Web Vitals measure loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). Crystallize: Core Web Vitals ↗

Agent Token

Summons a crawler bot that follows you and auto-fires at the nearest enemy every split second.

15 SECONDS50 PTS

Crawler companion

What the Agent Token gives you. It has a range of about half a screen, and it can't be hurt.

Click

The currency of the web. They're scattered everywhere and burst out of some Feeling Lucky blocks.

10 PTS

REAL SEO Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are the core numbers in Search Console's Performance report. Google: Performance report ↗

200 OK

Refills 40% of your Crawl Budget.

+40 BUDGET50 PTS

REAL SEO 200 means success: Google passes the page on to indexing. A 200 alone doesn't guarantee the page gets indexed, though. Google: HTTP status codes ↗

Indexed Page

An extra life. Rare. You can hold up to 5.

+1 LIFE50 PTS

Author Byline

Level 2 cover. Four of them sit between you and the models, and they crumble as they take hits. Your own shots pass straight through.

LEVEL 2

REAL SEO Google encourages accurate authorship information, such as bylines, wherever readers would expect it. It's part of E-E-A-T. Google: Creating helpful content ↗

Verified Authorship

Now and then a destroyed bot drops one. Catch it to rebuild every byline, including the ones that are gone.

LEVEL 2

Citation Farm

A saucer that crosses the top of the screen. Shoot it down and it sometimes drops a Shield, Core Web Vitals or an Agent Token.

LEVEL 2

REAL SEO Mass-producing pages to game rankings is "scaled content abuse" under Google's spam policies, whether people or AI write them. Google: Spam policies ↗

CHAPTER 7The world

Feeling Lucky block

Jump into it from below. You'll get a power-up, 200 OK, a life or a burst of Clicks. It turns grey once it's used.

Result card

Solid block. Stand on it, climb it, or use it to reach the bots.

Blue link

A floating platform you can jump up through from below and land on from above.

Sitemap checkpoint

There are three, roughly a quarter of the way in each. Touch one and it turns orange. When you lose a page you restart there with a full Crawl Budget, and the enemies ahead come back.

500 PTS

REAL SEO An XML sitemap lists the pages you want search engines to find, a checkpoint for crawlers. Semrush: Sitemap examples ↗

CHAPTER 8Scoring and the scoreboard

How you're ranked

Distance comes first. Whoever got furthest through Level 1 ranks highest, and finishing counts as 100%. Score only breaks ties between players who reached the same point.

One spot per name

The scoreboard keeps your best run for each username, so replaying can only move you up.

Game over

Lose all your Indexed Pages and the run ends. Your result is saved, and you get a ready-made post to share it.

Level 2 earns medals, not points

Finish Level 1 to unlock it. Level 2 never changes your score. Your best medal shows next to your name on the scoreboard.

Gold citation medal

Survive all four waves with at least 70% of the bots destroyed. Bots that reach the bottom or outlast the wave timer count as missed.

Silver citation medal

Survive all four waves with under 70% destroyed.

Bone medal

Lose all three Indexed Pages in the Wasteland. 404, medal not found. Retry as often as you like; only your best medal counts.

ACTIONPOINTS
Collect a Click10
Destroy a markdown token20
Grab a power-up, 200 OK or Indexed Page50
Click burst from a Feeling Lucky block50
Fact-check a Pop-up Banner10
Fact-check a Broken Redirect50
Fact-check a Toxic Backlink70
Fact-check a Hallucinating Bot100
Smash a Bloated JS Wall200
Reach a Sitemap checkpoint500
Reach the Golden Knowledge Graph2,000
Time bonus: every second under 5:00 at the finish10 / sec
Each Indexed Page left at the finish500

CHAPTER 9Secrets

The Open Directory never forgot you

A blast from the past for the old-timers. If you know it, you know it. Every so often, something from the old web floats across the sky for a few seconds. Click it or tap it if you're quick.

It hands over a super admin code, which you can enter from the pause menu. We won't say what it does, but those runs go on their own board: the DMOZ Legends.

The Wasteland has its own relic from the old web. It hands over the same code, plus a little thank-you.

REAL SEO DMOZ was the human-edited web directory that SEOs begged to get listed in, until it closed in 2017. PageRank was the link-based score at the heart of Google's original 1998 paper, and its public toolbar score was retired in 2016. Wikipedia: DMOZ ↗ · Wikipedia: PageRank ↗ · Brin & Page's original 1998 paper ↗