The race to monetize AI visibility services, according to new acronyms and expansion of existing fields of practice as the new trenches of engineering, this is something we have witnessed often over the past couple of years.
We see new entrants into the market because they see a gap, but no one really stops to ask the question: Why is there a gap in the first place?
The truth is simple. More often than not, the gap was not left open by accident, but rather was created deliberately as a result of Google changing course and introducing penalties for exactly the same manipulative practices people were doing. try repackaging today as solutions for AI visibility.
In the early days of SEO, the situation was very different than it is today, regardless of Google’s AI and overall search capabilities. The way Google indexed and weighted the weak factors that led to ranking order has changed significantly over the years. The two main manipulation mechanisms have always been content and links.
The rise and fall of AI-generated content and the misunderstanding between content production and The economics of Google crawling, I have already talked about it in another article. What we are now starting to see is a very confident entry into the market of services playing on how visibility is generated, based on a gap in the market that people are trying to exploit without really understanding where and why these bad habits have been driven underground.
A Brief History of Backlink Manipulation
Google Penguin Algorithmwhich is now part of the core algorithm, was a series of standalone updates focused on penalizing link manipulation practices. Not only in the volume of backlinks, but also in the over-optimization of anchor text, in unnatural patterns of getting links, in random and sudden spikes without any justification as to why the spike existed, as well as in patterns of websites linking to random websites and non-sequential content themes.
Google now does this algorithmically at scale. If we can quickly and easily see link manipulation taking place, simply by using exports from third-party tools or even in the UI of third-party tools, we can ensure that Google and Bing are also able to see this manipulation at scale.
Penalties for backlink manipulation still exist
A common misconception about Penguin becoming part of the core algorithm is that Google simply ignores spammy links – which you could almost run for free, buy backlinks and manipulate your profile as you wish, and you won’t receive a penalty because Google should ignore bad efforts. Anyone who believes this is seriously misinformed.
Over the past year, I have seen more link-based sanctions occur than in the previous five years. This is because people have purchased backlinks for AI purposes without understanding, and potentially ignoring, the underlying consequences of how they appear in Google and Bing’s indexes. Being there for diverse broadcast, earthingand stacked queries also play a role in AI visibility, not to mention the fact that you need to be strong and visible when it comes to being included. in training data.
Buying backlinks from a marketplace has been a risky practice since the introduction of Penguin. Failing to recognize and understand that doing something for AI does not make it an agnostic SEO practice, and you could very easily damage one while having minimal impact on the other.
How Gurus Are Accidentally Saving the Industry
There is a certain irony in the fact that new entrants to the organic viewability market are pushing these practices. What we learned from them is also most likely consistent with the commentary that SEO is dead and a dead end investment channel, but what they are really doing is securing the future of SEO for the rest of us.
By repackaging tactics that we consider short-sighted or spammy, they actually create a big pile of clutter and signal noise that Google will inevitably sweep over and ignore or penalize, as it has done in every previous cycle since the introduction of Penguin. Once the signal noise disappears, only those who were not penalized and did not engage in these tactics will remain.
SEO has always been about understanding human search intent, providing accurate answers, and building true authority over time.
Technology may be evolving from standard lists of links to conversational response engines, but the fundamental economics of how Google crawls and understands websites, and the fundamental economics of how Bing does the same, are relatively the samebut with an additional layer of AI in terms of overlay processing.
Far from killing the industry, the current wave of spam will only make high-quality SEO work more valuable than ever.
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