I'm wary of the methodology here. If a reporter typically on the google beat is doing searches from their account on "phones" after using the same device or account as the one they used to research for their last article on the pixel, it stands to reason google might put a pixel ad in there. I really do feel like this is being overstated; for example, I searched "watch" and received no ads for android wear at all, (mostly watches for women actually, which I recently bought as a gift).

That being said, the fact that this can happen at all is worth talking about. The magazine and newspaper companies didn't run hardware buisinesses on the side like this.

Edit: It seems like the third party SEMrush was used for the analytics, so that's certainly better than just typing it into google a bunch of times. I was being unfair to the WSJ. However I still can't reproduce the watch findings on their site https://www.semrush.com/info/Watch