SEO Veteran Charts Industry’s Evolution From Link Spam to AI Search in New Retrospective

Efryll Carmelo, a senior SEO manager based in the Philippines who has served clients in the United States, Canada and Australia since 2010, today published a retrospective detailing 15 years of search marketing evolution. The piece, titled ‘My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,’ documents how the discipline survived every algorithm crackdown predicted to end it and argues that the rise of AI search signals a new beginning rather than an obituary.

Carmelo revisits the volume era of 2010, when rankings were won through automated software such as Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai, along with widely circulated backlink packets that sold lists of profile pages on university and government domains. ‘My first job in this industry was link builder, and the job was exactly what it sounds like,’ Carmelo said. He personally built around ten micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content and Google ads, each earning twenty to fifty dollars a month.

The machine stopped in 2011 and 2012 when Google released the Panda and Penguin updates, targeting thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that Google’s disavow tool did not yet exist when Penguin first hit, leaving cleanup to be done manually. ‘Imagine one website with three thousand backlinks that now had to come down,’ he said. ‘Entire businesses disappeared from search results overnight.’

The years from 2018 to 2025 brought further changes. Google’s 2018 Medic update pushed expertise and trustworthiness into ranking decisions, the 2019 BERT model improved natural language understanding, the 2022 Helpful Content update rewarded people-first writing, and successive updates through 2025 enforced Google’s spam policies against content produced at scale without editorial oversight.

Search behavior is now shifting again. Industry tracking studies from 2026 report that AI Overviews appear in roughly 25% of Google searches, and that 58.5% of U.S. searches end without a click to any website. ChatGPT has reached approximately 900 million weekly active users. At the same time, AI-driven referral visits to retail sites converted 31% better than traditional traffic during the 2025 holiday season. Carmelo details how traditional optimization is expanding into generative engine optimization, the practice of earning citations in AI-generated answers.

‘Every few years this industry gets a funeral, and every few years the coffin is empty,’ Carmelo said. ‘Panda was supposed to kill SEO. Mobile was supposed to kill SEO. Now people say AI answers will kill it. What actually happens is the work gets renamed to answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization, and the fundamentals get stricter.’

Carmelo argues that the current moment favors newcomers rather than veterans. ‘In 2010 the barrier to entry was owning spam software. In 2026 it is curiosity,’ he said. ‘Anyone thinking about entering this profession should be running toward it, not away from it.’ The full retrospective is available on his website.

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