ILOILO CITY, Philippines — Efryll Carmelo, a senior SEO manager who has worked with clients in the United States, Canada, and Australia since 2010, today published "My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search," a retrospective documenting the discipline's survival through algorithm crackdowns and the rise of AI search.
The retrospective revisits the volume era of 2010, when rankings were won with automated software like Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai. Carmelo recalls building micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content, each earning $20 to $50 a month. "My first job in this industry was link builder, and the job was exactly what it sounds like," he said. "We wrote on Blogspot blogs, submitted the same article to EzineArticles in ten variations, and answered Yahoo Answers questions with a link back to the client."
The machine stopped with Google's Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012, targeting thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that the disavow tool did not yet exist, leaving cleanup to be done by hand. "Imagine one website with three thousand backlinks that now had to come down," he said. "We emailed webmasters one by one asking them to remove links we had spent years building. Entire businesses disappeared from search results overnight."
The years from 2018 to 2025 brought further change: Google's Medic update pushed expertise and trustworthiness, the BERT model improved natural language understanding, and the Helpful Content update rewarded people-first writing. Guest posting, once the industry's replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed.
Search behavior is shifting again. Industry tracking studies report that AI Overviews appear in roughly 25% of Google searches, and that 58.5% of U.S. searches end without a click, while ChatGPT has reached approximately 900 million weekly active users. 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," he 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 the current moment favors newcomers. "In 2010 the barrier to entry was owning spam software. In 2026 it is curiosity," he said. "The platforms are new, the measurement is unsettled, and nobody has fifteen years of experience in AI search, because the field is only a few years old."
"You do not survive fifteen years in search on tactics alone. You survive on patience, because results are earned in months rather than days, and on a genuine love for the game, because the game refuses to stay the same," he added.
