What Fresh Hell Awaits Us When SEO Is Replaced With AIO?

It took 20 years from Bell inventing the telegraph before someone sent an ad with it. It took ~7 years for the first piece of email spam to be sent. Any bets on what it will look like for AI?

Experimental AI Summary:

I open with my own costly, underwhelming SEO experiment and the fact that I've mostly abandoned Google for LLMs, arguing that if AI chat replaces search then AIO (AI optimization) will replace SEO. I frame influence as "numerous / high-reputation / mentions," recall the web's shift from Yahoo's directory to Google's PageRank—where "reputation" changed everything and spawned link-farm tactics—and ask how the same gaming might hit AI. I sketch possibilities: models pre-vetting training data and tagging low-trust commercial pages; spam-style gatekeeping of AI inputs; straightforward paid placements inside AI answers; or darker outcomes where cheap marketing pollutes corpora and bad actors weaponize hallucinations. The core question for me is whether LLMs can build sturdier reputation defenses than Google or whether their architecture makes them easier to spoof. For now, AI search feels like Google circa 1998—astonishingly good—but I doubt it stays pristine once marketers and scammers fully arrive.