Building a Multi-LLM News CMS with PHP 8.2: Lessons from 200+ Production Sites

A team running 200+ news portals in Turkey shares architectural lessons from integrating six LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral) into a PHP 8.2 news CMS. The core strategy is cascade routing — routing tasks to the cheapest capable model first, falling back to premium models only when needed. Combined with aggressive caching (~70% hit rate) and batch API usage, this achieves ~95% cost reduction vs. a GPT-4o-only approach. Key lessons include: don't lock into one provider, cache deterministic tasks aggressively, route by task complexity not hype, design for local regulations from day one, and prefer stable technology over trendy frameworks. The post also covers adapter-style integration for Turkey's 8 major news wire services and emerging AI visibility standards (llms.txt, ai-sitemap.xml, Schema.org JSON-LD).