I get that impression sometimes too. I had a comment a couple years ago on this site about how dumb it is that when I search for "TeamViewer" the first result is an ad for TeamViewer... why are they paying to advertise above their own page?

But someone pointed it out, if they aren't paying for that ad spot, then RealVNC, or LogMeIn, whoever else is competing will. Seems ridiculous.

It's also not necessarily guaranteed that it is in fact TeamViewer running the ad for TeamViewer.

It's a pretty common marketing practice to arbitrage referral benefits so that you might sign up for a product that offers cash referral bonuses of (let's say) $5 per signup. An affiliate marketer may take some petty cash and run some experiments, determine that ~5% of the people will sign up to an ad with highly effective copy, so then now they can run ads, potentially pay higher rates per click than TeamViewer does, and make a little passive income on the side.

To add to this, this is usually explicitly forbidden by most affiliate programs.

I'm pretty sure they do this because sometimes google returns the right sites seemingly by complete accident. Have you ever submitted a search, and there's a result for the right site, but it's to an irrelevant subdomain or archive section? Sometimes google gets me into parts of a website that users aren't supposed to be able to navigate to. Google has exposed weird personal files to me that were stored on commercial web sites multiple times, yet it couldn't return the actual intended entry point for those exact same websites. I have no choice but to assume malice over stupidity here.

Google has figured out a "legal" way to monetize one company's trademark to that company's competitors. Really makes a mockery of the trademark system.

I'd imagine if google didn't have such well financed lobbyists and lawyers, there would have been legal concessions years ago to eliminate this practice.

There's also an arms race thing going on if others start buying ads for things you'd rank highly for

This both enriches Google, impoverishes name-brands, and allows new entrants to compete.

Why not? It's a free market. Compete on product, not obscurity.

IP isn't free & ad spend doesn't scale with quality.

Yeah, if I search for "Sephora" and the first result is titled "Top quality makeup" and links to a no-name site with knockoff products, that's not competing on product.