At one point these SEO pages were in fact providing a real service, and you could view them as a sort of "manual", prototypical, distributed form of AI. Millions of people trying to understand what information was valuable and host webpages to satisfy the demand for that info, and get rewarded for doing so. It obviously went too far, but at one point, it did make sense to allow these websites to proliferate. I know without AI, I probably just would have clicked on the first link that said "types of wrenches" and read a little bit. I probably would have gotten my answer, it just wouldn't have been quite as laser-targeted to my exact question.
True, the early days these sites were genuinely helpful. The monetization model was a little different though which is what I think kept them useful. You'd use the content just to drive traffic, which would result in ad clicks on your banner ads, etc.
Then "content marketing" took over, and the content itself was now also used to sell a product or service, sort of an early form of influencer marketing and that is when I think it all started to go down hill. We stopped seeing the more in depth content which actually taught something, and more surface level keywords that were just used to drive you to their product/service.
OTOH, the early web was also full of niche forums, most viewable without an account and indexable, of about any topic you could imagine where you could interact with knowledgeable folks in that niche. Google would have been more helpful to users by surfacing more of those forums vs. the blogs.
Those forums are IMO the real loss here. Communities have moved into discord, or another closed platform that doesn't appear on the web, and many that require accounts or even invitations to just view read only.
