Senior SEO manager Efryll Carmelo has published a retrospective on his 15-year career in search engine optimization, tracing the industry's transformation from 2010's automated link-building software to 2026, when AI Overviews appear in roughly 25% of Google searches and 58.5% of U.S. queries end without a click, according to industry tracking studies cited in the piece. The retrospective, titled 'My 15-Year SEO Journey: From Spam Links to AI Search,' argues that the arrival of AI search is a beginning rather than an obituary for the discipline.
Carmelo revisits the 'Volume Era' of 2010, when rankings were won through automated software such as Bookmarking Demon and Market Samurai, and widely circulated 'Angela and Paul' backlink packets sold monthly lists of profile pages 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 personally built micro-niche websites on exact-match domains with thin content and Google ads, each earning $20 to $50 a month.
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. 'We emailed webmasters one by one asking them to remove links we had spent years building. Entire businesses disappeared from search results overnight,' he said, calling it the industry's first hard lesson that shortcuts become liabilities.
From 2018 to 2025, the retrospective argues, changes like Google's Medic update, the BERT model, and the Helpful Content update pushed expertise and people-first writing into ranking decisions. Guest posting, once the replacement for link spam, was itself commoditized and policed.
The AI search shift is now transforming the industry. According to 2026 studies, AI Overviews appear in 25% of Google searches, 58.5% of U.S. searches end without a click, and ChatGPT has reached approximately 900 million weekly active users. AI-driven referral visits to retail sites converted 31% better than traditional traffic during the 2025 holiday season. Carmelo details how 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 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. Anyone thinking about entering this profession should be running toward it, not away from it.'
The full retrospective is available on Carmelo's website.
