The race to monetize AI visualization services, seeking new names and expanding fields of practice as new engineering channels, is something we have seen a lot in the last few years.
We see newcomers to the market because they see a gap, but no one stops to ask the question: Why the gap in the first place?
The truth is simple. The loophole, in general, was not left open by accident, but rather was created on purpose after Google changed its approach and introduced penalties for the same deceptive practices that people try to package today as AI visibility solutions.
In the early days of SEO, it was very different from what it is now, except for AI and Google’s overall search features. How Google indexes and how Google measures the weak factors that lead to ranking have changed significantly over the years. The two main methods of manipulation have always been content and links.
The rise and fall of AI-generated content, and how there is a misunderstanding between content generation and Google’s analytics economics, I’ve covered in another article. What we are beginning to see now is the confident entry into the market of services that play on the side of the link of how visibility is generated, based on a market space where people try to exploit without understanding where and why those bad practices were carried out underground.
A Brief History of Backlink Usage
Google’s Penguin algorithm, now part of the main algorithm, was a series of independent updates focused on penalizing link manipulation practices. Not only with the volume of backlinks, but also with the optimization of the anchor text, unnatural patterns of getting links, random and sudden spikes with little reason why the spike exists, and patterns of websites that link to random websites with non-sequenced content.
Google does this now algorithmically at scale. If we can quickly and easily see ongoing link fraud, just by using exports from third-party tools or even from the user’s links to third-party tools, we can ensure that Google and Bing are also able to detect this fraud at scale.
Backlink Manipulation Penalties Still Exist
A common misconception about Penguin being part of the core algorithm is that Google simply ignores spammy links – that you can almost run around and buy backlinks and manage your profile to your heart’s content, and you won’t get a penalty because Google will have to ignore bad attempts. Anyone who believes this is misinformed.
In the past year, I’ve seen more link-based fines happen than in the five years before that. That’s because people buy backlinks for AI purposes without understanding, and possibly ignoring, the underlying effects of how they appear within the Google and Bing indexes. Being present in a variety of fan, base, and stacked queries also plays a role in the AI’s visibility, not to mention that it needs to be robust and predictable when it comes to fitting into training data.
Buying backlinks from the market has been a dangerous practice since the inception of Penguin. Failing to acknowledge and understand that doing something for AI doesn’t make for an ignorant SEO practice, and you can easily harm one while having little impact on the other.
Gurus Save an Industry from Disaster
There is a certain irony for new entrants to the virtual market pushing these practices. What we learned from them, and it may go along with the comment that SEO is dead and a dead investment channel, but what they are actually doing is protecting the future of SEO for all of us.
By repackaging tactics that we consider short-term or spam, what they are doing is actually creating a lot of clutter and signal noise that Google will inevitably sweep and ignore or punish, as it has done during all the previous cycles since the launch of Penguin. When the signal sound is over and cleared, only those who have not been punished and who have not participated in these tactics will remain.
SEO has always been about understanding the intent of a person’s search, providing accurate answers, and building real authority over time.
The technology may have evolved from a standard list of links to conversational response engines, but the basic economics of how Google crawls and understands websites, and the basic economics of how Bing does the same, is the same, albeit with an added layer of AI in terms of superimposed processing.
Far from killing the industry, the current wave of spam will only make high-quality SEO more effective than ever.
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