They get paid for during the ad, but my understanding is that it's more insidious than that.

I searched "buy rav4" and the first ad I got was Toyota, but the second I got was VW, "Compare the VW Tiguan."

My understanding is that if Toyota doesn't cough up the money to buy a high placement ad for "Rav4," the VW ad might actually be at the top of the list.

By making the "promoted" search results barely distinguishable from the organic ones (they used to be so distinct, now it's just a little tag that says "Ad" or "Sponsored") Google gets to reap the benefits of a bidding war for direct searches for a product.

Your Google Keyword Account Specialist also recommends you buy your own brand keywords.... and those of your competitors. Just to make sure that people spend the 10-15% percent of their budget on this

Right, but I think that buying an ad for a competitor's product would generally be a fairly low-value opportunity (if you're searching "Rav4" you'd most likely be looking to click on a site related to a Rav4), particularly if ads are clearly demarcated.

But, because ads now look organic, there's an increased chance that someone will click on it, so because of that UI change on Google's part, people now have to spend more on ads.

I'm not sure about the low value. If I'm searching for a Rav4, it probably behooves other makers of small SUV models--or even substitutes like a Suburu Outback--to help plant a seed about the other options out there just in case you're not thinking that way.

Companies pay top dollar to show an ad when someone searches their name, otherwise a competitor could make a paid ad slamming the product. We dealt with this first hand a year ago in my company.

Yep. Which is kinda insane when you think about it from a user perspective. You search for Rev4, as a user, and unless the company you’re searching for has paid Google not to basically fuck up the top result, you don’t actually get back what you wanted.

It’s almost like when you’re searching for a movie on Netflix and it only shows you similar titles because the movie is not in the catalog. Super annoying.

Sure, Netflix and Google have very different reasons to do that. Bus as a user: you search for A, but get B.

Not even taking into account how annoying it is from a company perspective.

Ehn, it is what it is. Everything atrophies, some faster than others.

Who cares about HN commentators when as a PM I am essentially judged on P/L and I want a good stock refresh.

And that's why I'll never work anywhere remotely B2C related.

The big problem is context. If someone is looking for a new car showing competitors offerings is really just classic advertising. If they're not they're probably looking for info about the car they own and it's mostly dead ad spend other than generic brand awareness.

Because they get paid for showing the ad.

> For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com.

You searched for a product and got... the manufacturer's web site as the top link. And you think that's... wrong? I mean, even if it's a paid ad, it's still a paid ad for the most relevant link to the content you searched for, right?

Are you just complaining that you saw an ad at all? But... surely if there's going to be a good market to advertise RAV4's to, it's to people searching for "rav4", no?

FWIW: I just tried this in an incognito window (to try to suppress ads). The top hit is indeed a tree of links to toyota.com, but they aren't marked as ads. The second hit is wikipedia. The third is a Car and Driver review page. The most SEOish link on the page is a still-legitimate-seeming link to "buyatoyota.com".