While the crosslinked polymer-based silica aerogels are the great improvements over the native silica aerogels, for many applications it is most needed to have a compressible aerogel with a high degree of porosity and surface area. Though some measure of compressibility is obtained in the cross-linked aerogels through the hybridization of the stiff backbone (polyvinyltrimethoxysilane; PVTMS) with a flexible backbone (poly(3-Glycidyloxypropyl)trimethoxysilane; PGPTMS), it seems that the extent of improvement is not significant in advancing the surface area and porous network. In this study, the effect of the graphene nanoplatelets (GnP) incorporation in aerogels made of backbone consisting of -C-O-C- (flexible backbone) has been examined while the inorganic siloxane crosslink (-Si-O-Si-) density between the underlying polymer chains was controlled by inducing hydrogen bonding between polymer chains and GnPs to reduce the structural shrinkage during gelation and drying. Typically, this allowed for control of the pore size and the surface area directly related to the presence of only 1wt% GnP integrated into the backbone, with the best results obtained using the lowest possible amount of GnP to improve aerogels mesoporous network made of polymerized P-GPTMS. More flexible backbone such as P-GPTMS chains are supposed to result in a more compliant aerogel but they tended to shrink, reducing the porosity since they suffer from the wrong combination of flexible backbone conjugated with an extensive number of permanent crosslinks with abundant unreacted hydroxyl groups ready to undergo permanent chemical shrinkage. To counteract this, the reinforced pre-polymer precursor with GnP was synthesized. In this strategy, we impart the same type of elastic properties as those seen with the hybrid PVTMS/PGPTMS-derived aerogels while also improving the mechanical strength by 138% and the surface area by ~205% by controlling the extent of GnPs exfoliation during the sol-gel transition