Senior SEO manager Efryll Carmelo, based in Iloilo City, Philippines, today published 'My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,' a retrospective tracing the evolution of search marketing from 2010's automated link-building software to 2026, when AI Overviews appear in one of every four Google searches and 58.5% of U.S. queries end without a click. The piece argues that each algorithm crackdown predicted to end SEO has instead reshaped it, and that the arrival of AI search is a beginning rather than an obituary.
Carmelo revisits the volume era of 2010, when rankings were won with automated software such as Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai, and backlink packets sold monthly lists of profile pages. 'My first job in this industry was link builder, and the job was exactly what it sounds like,' Carmelo said. He describes building micro-niche websites on exact-match domains that earned $20 to $50 a month, a machine that felt like it would run forever.
The machine stopped in 2011 and 2012 with Google's Panda and Penguin updates, targeting thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that Google's disavow tool did not yet exist, leaving cleanup to be done manually. '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 retrospective traces changes from 2018 to 2025, including the Medic update, BERT, and Helpful Content update, which rewarded people-first writing and enforced spam policies against content produced at scale. Guest posting, once the industry's replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed. Carmelo argues that traditional optimization is now 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. As long as there is a search box, there is an engine behind it, and there will be people whose job is to understand how that engine decides.'
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. Anyone thinking about entering this profession should be running toward it, not away from it.' He adds that survival in the field requires patience and a genuine love for the game, because the game refuses to stay the same.
