The British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, is accredited for the invention of WWW (World Wide Web) in 1989 while he was working at CERN. This might have people arguing that the origins of SEO dates back to 1991 with the launch of the first website.
However, to be honest SEO’s history can be dated back to 1997 when it was still considered a very new concept. Since then, well over two decades have passed, and now SEO is more or less considered a lifestyle.