I remember the CDs, they were everywhere lol. Luckily my brother was tech savvy and when I got my first PC, I asked what the deal was with AOL links and he laughed saying no one uses “AOL internet”. I remember they all but died in a year.

Sure it was marketing speak, but Usenet's eternal September started in late 1993, and that's also about when AOL opened up their email to the internet. By late 94 there was a functional browser and they were effectively an ISP with extra stuff (that no one wanted anymore). In some ways, the "AOL is the Internet" angle was an admission that "the Internet" was what people wanted, and AOL itself was redundant. It probably did cause people to spend more on internet service than they needed, but it was already a rear-guard action, whether AOL knew it or not.

I remember a very specific commercial where they were listing stuff that was "on" AOL, most or all of which was just on the broader actual Internet , and then closed with some pitch like, "AOL has things you can't get anywhere else," clearly implying everything they just listed was exclusive to AOL. I couldn't understand why every other ISP wasn't suing them into oblivion for that crap.