When the web was young, search engine optimisation was a wild west – back then many, many search engines existed with friendly names like Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista. Most are defunct – you may not know that Yahoo started as a search engine. One of my favourite names was Dogpile – you can imagine who came up with a name like that!
Once search engine businesses launched to index and create signposts around the world wide web canny marketers started trying to game the system. They quickly worked out ways to get their websites to appear on the first ten listed results, also known as page 1.
Google only started in 1998 and quickly became the industry leader because they approached search results differently. Their focus on link building (as proof that a site was important because other sites linked to it) rather than keyword matching meant that the answers you got from Google were not only fast, they served to reinforce already-popular websites who had strong inbound links.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Unethical and manipulative techniques that have been used to improve website search results, are called “Black Hat”. It’s a wonderful phrase that originated from early cowboy western movies where the baddies wore black hats and the good fellows wore white hats so you could tell them apart!
Once Google had developed its web bot search spiders to scan web pages, they built a database index of all the websites and links that they could find. This index includes the linkages between sites and assessments of visitor volumes and the frequency of updates with new content and information. Google quickly had a stranglehold on the search industry. And the consequence of this is that once you’re the top dog – you also get to be the policeman.
How did AI change SEO in 2024?
Changes to the Google algorithm affect search results.
Over time their engineers have announced major updates to the algorithm – each has a fancy name like Penguin, Florida, and Helpful. Understanding these updates and how they have changed the priority of search results is what has driven the evolution of SEO as a marketing activity.
High-profile businesses whose marketing team used black hat techniques got severely penalised after Google updates. Some of the most famous include
- BMW (2006) used cloaking and doorway pages of different content for humans vs search engines
- J.C. Penney (2011) used paid backlinks to manipulate rankings
- Rap Genius (2013) asked users to embed lyric pages with backlinks in exchange for social shares
- eBay (2013) created millions of low quality pages such as auto-generated product variants
- Expedia (2021) used aggressive affiliate linking with keyword-stuffed anchor text
All these serve to remind us that eventually Google finds you out. Their algorithm updates are often designed to target bad actors demoting them from search results and causing them to publicly apologise and do a lot of work disavowing links and changing web pages in order to regain their rankings. Not a “good look” for a marketing team.
Put simply, Google may be the policeman, but they are also very clear about what is allowed in their Webmaster Guidelines; you can monitor warnings from your Google Search Console.
The AI gamechanger
Google has been the dominant search engine for the period from 2000 to 2023 when AI again changed the game. Before AI, SEO professionals (like the numero® team) needed to understand 4 things
- the search algorithm
- the competitive landscape for keywords for each client’s website
- technical SEO on websites
- ways of writing web content to tick all these boxes.
Since 1988 we’d visit a search engine and type in our question or search sentence, and results would be delivered as links to websites (natural search results) and as advertisements (from companies advertising against those keywords). No longer.
Today, writing in mid 2025, this has all changed. Many customers experience “zero-click searches” when they use a search engine but never click through to a destination website. Many people only use AI tools like Grok or ChatGPT to get answers which they’d previously got from search results.
Read the answer in the AI Overview search result and not need to click anywhere.
Richard Gilbert, numero’s Founder, described search engines in 2024 as “answer engines” because using voice search means we now expect conversational questions and answers in our search results.
I see a future when chatbots provide search answers which may be drawn from multiple sources, not necessarily Google, and these are faster, more personalised and concentrated on the very top websites only. This has implications for non-US business websites and smaller niche businesses who risk never being cited in AI search results. In 2025 numero created a SEO service that neutralises these tendencies.
The search engine professional has also adapted so that all the Google algorithm changes (RankBrain 2015, BERT 2019, MUM 2021) as well as the Helpful Content Update from 2022 are incorporated into our best practices. Numero prides ourselves on staying at the forefront of best practice and ethical SEO so that our clients benefit.
The many changes to SEO marketing have been classified into four stages by Rob Hoffman, Founder at Content Studios. He defined each with a phase in an ebook, the Road to SEO 4.0.
- SEO 1.0 Wild West from early 1990s – 2000
- SEO 2.0 Content is King from mid-2000s – early 2010s
- SEO 3.0 Machines Start Thinking from mid-2010s – 2020s
- SEO 4.0 The AI Revolution from 2022 onwards
These are somewhat helpful for us all to understand because the SEO techniques used in each are different – and many of the methods used in earlier phases are now classified as Black Hat after Google’s algorithm updates specifically outlawed their practices.
If you are discussing SEO services with a performance marketing agency, take a close look at what they offer to do for you. Not all the early techniques are bad – many are the foundation of best practice SEO today. But if you’re being offered only SEO 2.0 techniques in 2025, beware.
SEO techniques through the 4 ages of SEO
These are the top-level SEO methods which align with each of the major development stages since the 1990s. Do ask us to explain any which you need in more detail and context.
- SEO 1.0 Exact match domains, dense keyword stuffing, link farming, directory listing
- SEO 2.0 Low quality, thin, and duplicate content, social media sharing strategies, shareable content, influencer outreach and guest blogging.
- SEO 3.0 User-friendly meta titles, descriptions and tags. Mobile first results, conversational queries, and links between people, concepts and place entities. Page experience becomes a ranking factor, complex query resolution, E-A-T for YMYL content, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) firsthand experience for all content, local SEO and featured snippets
- SEO 4.0 Programmatic SEO, AI created content, E-E-A-T with verified credentials, citations and peer reviews.SGE delivers answers directly in SERPs followed by Answer Engine Optimisation [link to our blog article]. Vertical search for social, visual and AI search results as well as search engines.
While the AI machines have got smarter and faster, so have the AI policemen!
Any content which is not fact-checked and high quality will not rank well; E-E-A-T is an ever-larger quality signal, and programmatic SEO has to be high quality. Underlying all of this is the deep reliance on user intent signals and website schema markup / structured data. That’s why numero builds websites as well as offering SEO services – the two sit side by side mutually reinforcing each other. Numero continues to see deep advantages for client websites who are SEO optimised. You can be sure we’ll be continuing to test new SEO methods which help your website to rank well and bring the right sort of customers who are ready to buy.
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Want your website to thrive in the AI era of SEO? Contact us today or explore our SEO solutions for 2025 and beyond.
Author Expertise: John Anthony Talaguit
John brings comprehensive digital marketing expertise spanning strategic planning, technical optimisation, and multi-channel execution to numero®’s clients. His core strengths include developing timeline-driven marketing strategies, advanced SEO implementation with schema markup and Core Web Vitals optimisation, and comprehensive Google Analytics tracking. He excels in paid advertising across Google Ads, YouTube, and display networks, whilst maintaining expertise in conversion rate optimisation and email marketing. Technical capabilities encompass WordPress development, mobile-first optimisation, and scripting in HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. John’s experience extends to social media management, e-commerce optimisation, and cross-team project management, making him a well-rounded digital marketing strategist with strong technical acumen.
