I think at some point in the past Google shifted it's stance of SEO from "if you do SEO you are cleary trying to game the system and will be punished" to "we ar

I think at some point in the past Google shifted it's stance of SEO from "if you do SEO you are cleary trying to game the system and will be punished" to "we are generally okay with SEO as that easens the burden of trying to guess content, and will only rarely punish it". One instance that seemed like a turning point there was their reversal on the search penalty of genius.com after they were found gaming the system, something that I think was enforced much harder in the past. So I think with embracing SEO spam to some degree (in combination with generally tailoring the behaviour of the search results more towards "consumption"), they must have lost parts of the resiliency. In contrast Kagi seems to be very alergic to SEO spam (AI generated or not), sometimes even too much.