Are We Repeating History and Risking Backlink Penalties?

The rush to capitalize on AI visibility services, complete with shiny new acronyms and rebranded tactics dressed up as fresh engineering disciplines, has become a defining trend of the past couple of years. New players flood the market because they spot an opportunity, yet almost no one pauses to consider a crucial question: Why does that gap exist in the first place?

The answer is straightforward. More often than not, that gap wasn’t left open by chance. It was deliberately created when Google shifted its approach and introduced penalties for the very same manipulative practices now being repackaged as AI visibility solutions.

SEO looked very different in its early days, even before AI and Google’s expanded search features became central. The way Google indexed content and weighed weaker ranking factors has evolved dramatically. The two primary levers for manipulation have always been content and links. I’ve already addressed the rise and fall of AI-generated content and the common misunderstanding of Google’s crawl economics. But now, a new wave of services is boldly entering the market, focusing on the link side of visibility. They’re exploiting a perceived gap without understanding why those bad habits were originally driven underground.

A Brief History of Backlink Manipulation

Google’s Penguin algorithm, now fully integrated into the core algorithm, was originally a series of standalone updates designed to penalize link manipulation. This wasn’t just about the sheer volume of backlinks. It targeted over-optimized anchor text, unnatural link-building patterns, sudden and unexplained spikes in links, and patterns of websites linking out to random, unrelated content. Google now detects these patterns algorithmically and at scale. If you can easily spot link manipulation using exports from third-party tools, rest assured that Google and Bing can see it too.

Backlink Penalties Are Still Very Real

A dangerous myth has emerged since Penguin became part of the core algorithm: that Google simply ignores spammy links. The thinking goes that you can buy backlinks and manipulate your profile freely without penalty because Google must overlook the bad efforts. This belief is gravely mistaken.

In the past year, I have observed more link-based penalties than in the previous five years combined. The reason is simple. People have purchased backlinks for AI purposes without understanding how those links appear in Google’s and Bing’s indexes, and without considering the consequences. Being present for various fan-out, grounding, and stacked queries matters for AI visibility, not to mention the need for strong visibility to be included in training data. Buying backlinks from a marketplace has been risky since Penguin’s introduction. Failing to realize that doing something for AI doesn’t make it an agnostic SEO practice can easily damage one channel while barely helping the other.

How Gurus Are Accidentally Saving the Industry

There’s a certain irony in seeing new entrants push these practices. They likely align with the narrative that SEO is dead or a dead-end investment channel. Yet, what they are actually doing is securing SEO’s future for everyone else. By repackaging short-termist, spammy tactics, they are creating a massive pile of clutter and signal noise. Google will inevitably sweep through and penalize or ignore it, just as it has in every cycle since Penguin. Once the noise is cleared, only those who avoided these tactics and remained unpenalized will survive.

SEO has always been about understanding human search intent, providing accurate answers, and building genuine authority over time. Technology may be shifting from standard link lists to conversational answer engines, but the fundamental economics of how Google and Bing crawl and understand websites remain largely the same, with an added AI processing layer on top. Far from killing the industry, this current wave of spam will only make high-quality SEO work more valuable than ever before.