The model further suggests a design opportunity for plasmonic linker gels, where optical response is known to be sensitive to the presence of close nanoparticle separations, which give rise to pronounced LSPR coupling. By choosing blends with different proportions of small linkers (but the same molar average linker length), it should be possible to deliberately modulate the number of close nanoparticle contacts and hence the structure-dependent nearand far-field optical response of the network, while leaving gel mechanical properties largely unchanged.