AI transformed search crawlers into large-scale scrapers that absorb and reorganize internet content, breaking the SEO reward system. Publishers and marketers who relied on keyword-stuffed pages lost the promised traffic when AI returned synthesized answers instead of link lists. The practice of stuffing keywords to game crawlers led to low-value, ad-heavy pages that depended on search-driven clicks for revenue. The collapse of that monetization model destroyed the blogging-for-dollars economy and its supporting services. Many marketers stopped producing keyword-focused copy and shifted to writing and marketing strategies that do not rely on gaming search algorithms.
When AI started to rise as a new way to scrape and organize the internet, it caught most people off guard, including marketers and publishers. See, the tools were already there for the AI providers to come in and absorb the information from almost every page of the internet, because almost every page provider wanted to participate in the SEO game, especially those page providers who were working with my friend and "adjusting" their information to game the SEO system.
So in return for the possibility of links to their pages being put in front of millions of people, those page providers stuffed keywords into their content to make things easier for the crawlers. The more that worked, the more they did it. When AI happened, and crawlers became scrapers and lists of links became AI slop answers, that tacit promise of clicks for keywords was broken. This hurt every single page provider. But it absolutely killed the blogging-for-dollars industry.
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