Is there an appreciable difference between a company that controls what information is surfaced via pagerank and one that does so via LLM?

Remember the past scandals with google up/downranking various things? This isn't a new problem. Wrt how the average person gets information google doesn't really have more control because people aren't clicking through as much.

The main difference is that pagerank still rewarded content creators with an audience. Now Google extracts all the value of their work.