Senior SEO manager Efryll Carmelo, based in Iloilo City, Philippines, has published a retrospective titled 'My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,' chronicling the dramatic evolution of search engine optimization from the era of automated link-building software to the current rise of AI-generated search results. The piece, available on his website, argues that despite repeated predictions of SEO's demise, the discipline continues to adapt and thrive.
Carmelo began his career in 2010 as a link builder, an era when rankings were driven by volume. He recalls using automated software like Bookmarking Demon to submit sites to hundreds of social bookmarking directories overnight, and Market Samurai to surface low-competition keywords. Practitioners purchased widely circulated 'Angela and Paul' backlink packets containing monthly lists of profile pages on university and government domains where anyone could drop a link. 'My first job in this industry was link builder, and the job was exactly what it sounds like,' Carmelo said. He 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 industry faced its first reckoning in 2011 and 2012 with Google's Panda and Penguin updates, which targeted thin content and manipulative links. Google's disavow tool did not yet exist, forcing manual cleanup. 'Imagine one website with three thousand backlinks that now had to come down,' Carmelo said. 'Entire businesses disappeared from search results overnight. That was the industry's first hard lesson: whatever shortcut works today is the liability you will be dismantling tomorrow.'
From 2018 to 2025, Google's algorithm updates—including the 2018 Medic update, the 2019 BERT model, and the 2022 Helpful Content update—pushed expertise, trustworthiness, and people-first writing. Guest posting, once the replacement for link spam, became commoditized and policed.
Now, search behavior is shifting again. Industry studies 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. Carmelo notes that 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. '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.' He advises anyone thinking about entering the profession to 'run toward it, not away from it.'
