Hi everyone, this is Neo.

If you’ve been doing independent site SEO for a while, or you know anything about the history of search engines, you’ve heard of Google’s early “earthquake”-scale algorithm updates — the infamous Florida, Allegra, and Brandy updates.

Back then, those updates were turning points in search. They fundamentally rewrote the rules of website ranking and the underlying logic of SEO. The upheaval was brutal: countless sites saw rankings collapse overnight, entire categories instantly lost visibility, and SEO strategies that had been printing money became useless almost literally within a day.

Now, with the explosion of AI-generated content, low-value pages are flooding the internet — and a familiar, dangerous signal is reappearing: faced with an unprecedented content explosion, will Google repeat the “great purge” of the past?

The underlying systems powering search engines have evolved, of course, but the pressure they’re under today is strikingly similar to back then. History doesn’t repeat itself simply, but the conditions that trigger major updates are converging again. If this flood of low-quality content keeps getting worse, a similar “algorithm reset” is hardly alarmist talk.