Efryll Carmelo, a senior SEO manager based in Iloilo City, Philippines, today published “My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,” a retrospective on fifteen years inside the search industry. The piece documents how SEO survived algorithm crackdowns that were predicted to end it, and argues that the arrival of AI search is a beginning rather than an obituary.
The retrospective revisits the volume era of 2010, when rankings were won with automated software such as Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai. Carmelo describes building micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content and Google ads, each earning $20 to $50 a month. “That felt like a machine that would run forever,” he 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, leaving cleanup to be done manually. “We emailed webmasters one by one asking them to remove links we had spent years building,” he said. “Entire businesses disappeared from search results overnight.” He calls this the industry’s first hard lesson: whatever shortcut works today is the liability you will be dismantling tomorrow.
The years from 2018 to 2025 brought the Medic update, the BERT model, and the Helpful Content update, which rewarded people-first writing and enforced Google’s spam policies. Guest posting, once the replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed.
Now, search behavior is shifting again. Industry tracking studies in 2026 report that AI Overviews appear in roughly 25% of Google searches, and 58.5% of U.S. searches end without a click to any website. 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,” 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. Anyone thinking about entering this profession should be running toward it, not away from it.”
The full retrospective is available on Carmelo’s website.
