Efryll Carmelo, a senior SEO manager based in Iloilo City, Philippines, has published a retrospective titled "My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search," tracing the transformation of search marketing from the era of automated link-building software to the current landscape where AI Overviews appear in one of every four Google searches and 58.5% of U.S. queries end without a click.
The retrospective revisits the early 2010s, when rankings were won through volume. Automated tools like Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai dominated, and backlink packets containing lists of profile pages on university and government domains were widely circulated. Carmelo recalls building micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content and Google ads, 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," said Carmelo. "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 industry faced its first reckoning with Google's Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012, which targeted thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that the disavow tool did not yet exist, forcing manual cleanup. "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."
From 2018 to 2025, changes included the Medic update, BERT, and the Helpful Content update, which pushed expertise and people-first writing. Guest posting, once a replacement for link spam, became commoditized and policed. The current shift involves AI Overviews, with industry tracking studies showing 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.
"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."
