Senior SEO manager Efryll Carmelo traces 15 years 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. In his newly published retrospective, “My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,” Carmelo documents how the discipline survived every algorithm crackdown that was predicted to end it, and why he argues the arrival of AI search is a beginning rather than an obituary.
The retrospective revisits an era of search marketing that younger practitioners never saw. In 2010, rankings were won with volume: automated software such as Bookmarking Demon submitted sites to hundreds of social bookmarking directories overnight, Market Samurai surfaced low-competition keywords, and the widely circulated “Angela and Paul” backlink packets sold monthly lists of profile pages, including 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,” said Efryll Carmelo, Senior SEO Manager. “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. I personally built around ten micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content and Google ads, and each one earned twenty to fifty dollars a month. At the time, that felt like a machine that would run forever.”
The machine stopped in 2011 and 2012, when Google released the Panda and Penguin updates targeting thin content and manipulative links. Carmelo notes that Google’s disavow tool did not yet exist when Penguin first hit, leaving cleanup to be done by hand. “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. That was the industry’s first hard lesson: whatever shortcut works today is the liability you will be dismantling tomorrow.”
The retrospective also revisits transitional artifacts of the period: separate m-dot mobile sites that companies maintained before responsive design became standard, custom page tabs that brands designed directly inside Facebook, and the freelance marketplaces oDesk, Freelancer.com, and OnlineJobs.ph, where much of the Philippine SEO workforce, Carmelo included, found its first international clients.
The years from 2018 to 2025 brought a different kind of change, the retrospective argues. Google’s 2018 Medic update pushed expertise and trustworthiness into ranking decisions, the 2019 BERT model improved the engine’s grasp of natural language, the 2022 Helpful Content update rewarded people-first writing, and successive updates through 2025 enforced Google’s spam policies against content produced at scale without editorial oversight. Guest posting, once the industry’s replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed.
Search behavior is now shifting again. Industry tracking studies published in 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, while 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. In the piece, 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,” he 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,” 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.”
“This field never sits still, and that is the whole point,” he added. “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.”
