From all4gsm.net to AI answers
What getting found meant when I started in 2004, what it means now that AI writes the answer, and the part that never changed. With the receipts.
I built my first websites in a cyber café in Morocco, in 1999. Nobody taught me. I learned by taking pages apart, putting them back together, and watching which ones people actually found.
2004: links were the currency
By 2004 I was building sites of my own, and the Wayback Machine still has them. all4gsm.net, captured in August 2004, was a free SMS text portal. Its footer reads “Design and programming by Youssef El Hodaigui.” smsufree.com, captured that December, carries the same line.
Read the rest of that footer and you can see how search worked then: “Add a site”, “Link to us”, “Link partners”. Getting found meant getting linked. You built pages, traded links with other sites in your niche, and the search engines counted.
By 2007 I was selling that know-how. khidma.net, captured in February 2007, offered SEO and web development services.
2008 to 2016: agencies, then products
In 2008 I opened my first agency, Impact Web Design, in Charlotte, North Carolina. It became Web Stormz, then Effectus360. Today it is Mindflow Marketing.
Twice I stepped out of agency work to build products. I was a partner and product manager at iSolveIT, which made a workforce-management app, and then CTO and co-founder of uServia, a marketplace app we launched on iOS and Android. At uServia I ran the user interviews that shaped what we built. Products teach you to start from the person on the other end.
2026: an AI writes the answer
Now the first answer a buyer reads is often written by an AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews don’t hand over ten links. They name a few businesses and say why.
At Mindflow we studied what ChatGPT checks before it recommends a contractor. In 11,982 ChatGPT answers about named contractors, the Better Business Bureau was cited in 10,582, government or licensing sites in 10,288, and the company’s own website in 9,557.
That is a different currency. In 2004 a site got found because other sites linked to it. In 2026 a business gets named when independent sources agree about it: who it is, that it is licensed, that it is real.
I checked what AI says about me
This week I asked those same systems who I am. They got the basics right: founder of Mindflow Marketing, in SEO since the 2000s. The details came from places I had stopped looking after: an old profile with a year count I no longer use, a press release from 2014.
So I am fixing my own record the way I would fix a client’s. One page that states the facts. Old profiles brought in line with it. Evidence wherever a claim needs it. That is why the 2004 captures above sit on my About page, and why my companies and projects are listed with roles and dates.
What didn’t change
The job is the same as it was in 2004: help a business be found, be trusted, and be the only choice. The machines doing the reading changed. What they reward is still a business that is real, clear and checkable.
I’ll write here when I find something worth saying. If you want the next one by email, Field Notes is the newsletter.