Yes, Google search did it. And that's exactly why we allowed it to kill the internet - or rather, we killed the internet with it.

Older indexing systems relied on human labour, but they sorted and indexed the content by itself; Google instead did it by indirect means (the pagerank algorithm), because automated systems do not understand the content. At the same time that this allowed search to scale further, it also opened room to score higher in those indirect means without better content - SEO.

That's exactly what's happening here, again. LLMs also don't understand content (here's some proof), but they're really good to sort it. They work better than the pagerank algorithm, but they also open room for exploits that the text dubbed LLMO - ways to make your content more likely to be brought up by LLMs without improving it for human readers.