Which can be summarised as the "PR industry", and much of the history of SEO and overlaps with the thousands of agencies out there. Goes back to the earliest rings of blogspot spam promoting some dubious business or service. I think it was already a thing the very first time I became aware of SEO as something beyond just the local on page organisation of site, tags and such like. So probably mid 00's.

There have, of course, been no shortage of press stories about the tiny minority ethical side of this - allowing some crime victim to move beyond the story of their attack or similar.

The press don't - at least as far as I have seen - yet seem to connect any of the above with the relatively recent influence on elections, stories of fake news, or use by politicians themselves as reputation management (e.g. that Boris Johnson interview where he was randomly claiming out of nowhere, and thoroughly unbelievably, his hobby is making model busses out of cardboard boxes. Gets reported everywhere, the £350m promises on the side of the Brexit bus gets moved down a Google page or two).