Efryll Carmelo, a senior SEO manager based in Iloilo City, Philippines, has published “My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,” a retrospective that traces the transformation of search marketing from the early days of automated link-building software to the current era of AI Overviews and zero-click searches. The article argues that despite recurring predictions of the industry's demise, SEO has survived every major algorithm crackdown and is now evolving into generative engine optimization.
The retrospective revisits the “Volume Era” of 2010, when rankings were won through sheer quantity. Carmelo describes using automated software such as Bookmarking Demon to submit sites to hundreds of social bookmarking directories overnight, and Market Samurai to surface low-competition keywords. 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. “At the time, that felt like a machine that would run forever,” Carmelo said.
The machine stopped in 2011 and 2012 with Google's Panda and Penguin updates, which targeted thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that Google's disavow tool did not yet exist when Penguin first hit, forcing SEOs to manually request link removals. “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,” he said.
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, and the 2022 Helpful Content update rewarded people-first writing. Guest posting, once the industry's replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed.
Now, search behavior is 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. 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 rather than veterans. “In 2010 the barrier to entry was owning spam software. In 2026 it is curiosity. 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.”
“This field never sits still, and that is the whole point. 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.
