I think calling it AI horsepiss implies it will be just as bad, just in different ways (and I agree)

Search engine manipulation isn't really even a search problem. It's a Google problem. Google's struggle with search engine manipulation begins and ends with their advertisement based business model. As long as their main source of revenue is the very ads on the websites that pollute their search results, they will never find a solution to the problem.

Search engine spam increases the search count (apparently an important KPI), and it also increases ad impressions, both on the SERP and on the results pages.

This is a conclusion that is straight from Page and Brin themselves[1].

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a

That's overly pessimistic. It will be gamed to the same *ends*, but you'll have to game it in slightly different ways.