I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.

I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?

1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)

Ironically, by linking to it you’ve probably vastly boosted it’s rank on Google.

Huh. I wonder how much effort it would take to have a noticeable effect on the AdSense algorithm by sharing select ad links like this?

HN uses rel="nofollow" for links in comments, for this exact reason.

Lol, the exact same thing happened to me. I was about to leave a very confused comment.

Safari has ad blockers now too

I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.

Even Edge has ad blockers to an extent. The only browser that doesn't natively block trackers, or does stuff to reduce the power of adblockers is Chrome. Coincidentally, they are owned by the biggest ad network on earth.